I'm excited to do some more Pascal in the near future. From what I know about it I can attest to some of your points (fast compilation and performance). However

I'm excited to do some more Pascal in the near future. From what I know about it I can attest to some of your points (fast compilation and performance). However I do consider the syntax one of the main points why I stick with it. It is elegant and extremely efficient, if you know how to use it. It is indeed quite clunky to have to write so many begins and ends (after all, there is typically one of them each 3 lines or so). And you shouldn't use unintelligible, clever tricks in C, at all. They are very easy to avoid (although I agree that even K&R had some of those in it). Related: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favorite_Programming_Language http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favo... http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html