> Niklaus Wirth's Pascal was more of a teaching tool than a useful programming language. Which is one reason I don't like self-conscious "teaching" programming

> Niklaus Wirth's Pascal was more of a teaching tool than a useful programming language. Which is one reason I don't like self-conscious "teaching" programming languages: They rarely escape the stench of condescension that pervades such endeavors, which means they lack features some designer or team of designers though were "too advanced" for early learners but which are essential to writing any nontrivial code. See also: BASIC, another language where the standard is honored more in the breach than the observance, to the point that "Basic" is more of a "vibe" than any actual set of syntax and features you can point to. (In fact, modern nice Basic dialects have nearly converged with Object Pascal.) > Pascal did, however, have a very nice feature - nested functions. It's the one feature from Pascal that I incorporated into D, and they're such a nice feature I continue to be surprised they aren't adopted by other languages. Not that you don't know this, of course, but GCC has long has nested functions as an extension to the C programming language. Which, again, is an example of a nice quality-of-life feature added to a somewhat lacking language as a nonstandard extension. Oh, well.