Pascal was the teaching language in the early 80s. I had compilers available for the IBM 370 (VM/CMS), the VAX (VMS) and even cross-compilers for bare metal MC6

Pascal was the teaching language in the early 80s. I had compilers available for the IBM 370 (VM/CMS), the VAX (VMS) and even cross-compilers for bare metal MC68000 and PDP/11. Early Macintosh development used Pascal (though it wouldn't run on the earliest Macs) It wasn't ideal for every use, and Prof. Wirth, an academic, basically left extending the language to the compiler vendors. Now I'm teaching freshman software engineering students and we use Python. I personally like it but some of it is pretty idiosyncratic. It's going to be a more difficult transition from Python to compiled languages like C/C++ than it was for Pascal. The big difference is Python is used in the industry, so knowing it is worth more than knowing Pascal back in the day.