Pascal, even Wirth's Pascal, was a huge improvement over the other languages commonly used at the time. In Pascal's heyday in the 1970s and early 1980s, most

Pascal, even Wirth's Pascal, was a huge improvement over the other languages commonly used at the time. In Pascal's heyday in the 1970s and early 1980s, most programmers came to Pascal from BASIC or old FORTRAN (FORTRAN II or IV, not 77). Compared to these, Pascal offered: long identifiers (not 1 or 2 characters like BASIC or 6 like old FORTRAN), block structure and structured programming (not line numbers and GOTOs), record data types, pointers, and memory management with new and dispose (instead of statically allocated arrays and COMMON blocks), nested structure and lexical scope (instead of everything defined at top level). All this was a revelation and made whole new programming techniques and styles available.