Quote Originally Posted by dmantione
I consider being suitable for both procedural and OOP programming a strong point of Pascal.
Another strength of Pascal in its procedural paradigm is that it's pseudo-structural in fact. It's one of the few languages that inherently provides encapsulation without the need of OOP.

Take a look at a simple Pascal unit. In the "interface" section you can have variables, procedures and so on - similar to what you will be having in public section of an object. In similar way, "implementation" section contains private code, variables that is used by the unit internally. It has also initialization/finalization sections which work like constructors/destructors.

Thus, a single unit is already a limited object construct, which allows you to develop object-oriented applications without actually using what we formally call classes.

Actually, I don't think you need to promote Pascal langauge itself. I'd promote more the framework, the compiler capabilities and the IDE. Unfortunally, current Delphi implementation falls short in compiler area when compared to FreePascal.

Delphi's still strong point is IDE, but honestly, after using latest Visual Studio you start to see the developers of Delphi as pawns who have fallen behind the marketing of .NET. A simple hint in Delphi code editor takes 2-5 seconds to load, while in Visual Studio it's instant. An IDE should be as much responsive as possible, so on this matter, .NET *is not the right tool for the job*.