Pascal. Dialects. That was the problem. Pascal was designed as a teaching language, then people realized it sucked as a language in the real world, so they ext

Pascal. Dialects. That was the problem. Pascal was designed as a teaching language, then people realized it sucked as a language in the real world, so they extended it. There were quite a few Pascal variants in the late 70s / early 80s, and none of the useful code you could write in them was portable. C had all the features you needed in an OS-level language, without resorting to variants (the X86 near/far bullshit notwithstanding, you used macros and typedefs to shift that stuff around). So Pascal more or less died in the industry. I was at Apple when they converted from a Pascal shop to a C shop. There wasn't any big managerial push, just individual engineers or small teams realizing that the nightmare was over and they could use a language that sucked a lot less.