I think Wirth said something like "I am a programmer who is a professor, and a professor who is a programmer." Definitely a huge inspiration to me, both for the

I think Wirth said something like "I am a programmer who is a professor, and a professor who is a programmer." Definitely a huge inspiration to me, both for the elegance and compactness of his system designs as well as the idea that research could and should affect practice, and vice-versa. At least with -fbounds-safety clang is finally catching up with what Pascal (including UCSD, Apple, and Turbo Pascal) and Ada (a rather more complicated descendant of Pascal) compilers had in the 1980s. (Delphi and Free Pascal still have range checking today.)