I'm not sure how relevant it is to talk about the popularity of pascal in relation to other languages. If it's in terms of an open source project and attracting the largest number of users/devs as possible, then why choose Pascal anyway?

Given that the use of other languages such as Java effectively eclipses Pascal (pun intended) the only justifications I can currently think of are :

* Because you love the language

* Because of a large existing code-base that would be uneconomical to port to another language (including the use of specialized third party pascal code)

* Because you intend to write something big and believe the strong typing of Pascal will reduce your bugs in the long term.

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That said I'm delighted that Pascal use is going up again!