Most of the "features" of the language is what I call "constraints". Old Kernigan's "Why Pascal is not my favorite language" in large part stlil applies today -

Most of the "features" of the language is what I call "constraints". Old Kernigan's "Why Pascal is not my favorite language" in large part stlil applies today - the damn thing simply wasn't designed to be practical, and I was paid money for nearly 3 years out of college to write Pascal code, this i s probably why I have such a strong opinion about it. Pascal's OOP is about as useless as C#'s compared to power of what multiple inheritance + templates give you, not to mention the true Smalltalk-style message passing. Virtual constructors is not a "feature", it's (just like various additions to C#/Java) is an afterthought patch to a rigid static world. This is very typical for created-in-a-lab languages: they were designed with a average Joe programmer in mind, protecting him from shooting himself in a foot, and later on, to make them less painful to use, were given these "features". Pascal's came from academia blessed by a traditional and inevitable "kiss of death" preventing it from generating a true massive fan following. Compare that to Unix/C/C++ (or Lisp, Smalltalk, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc) that were created by programmers for programmers.