I learned Pascal by myself when first used it on a machine that was something in between of ZX Spectrum and C64; back then it was highly advanced compared to its Basic companion. It was a sort of prototype of language and compiler as its syntax was quite weird, I think, it was even case-sensitive. Later on, re-learned Turbo Pascal 3 and then moved to TP5 on my brand new 386-40 Mhz IBM PC, which was also a hell of machine on its own (for me, after using some crappy XTs and 286, it was a dream computer ).
First, AFAIR, the original Pascal specification had strings in it. Second, I think your teacher was on good track. You learn more when there are more restrictions, which you need to overcome. Sure, you would probably liked that the language, compiler and/or your teacher would do the entire homework for you, but you will not learn anything this way. In a learning process sometimes you need to start with pure basics. After all, if you can't handle the lack of strings (which, in other languages, such as C/C++ simply don't exist), how are you going to handle more complex tasks?
I for one would really appreciate to have a teacher back then to teach me Pascal, no matter how rudimentary or restricted it would have been.
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