(Once again cross posted.)

This will be another short one, since I haven’t used Pascal in decades.

Although my supervisor at CDI recommended me for a promotion, a recession hit and I was laid off instead. I was able to get a job as a high school and middle school science teacher for the Chilton Independent School District. (The district only had a single campus, for all grades K–12.) Two of the classes I taught were 8th grade computer literacy and upper class computer science. We had a room full of Apple IIe computers, with programs like Oregon Trail and Math Blaster and, of course, a BASIC interpreter. I had read, though, that BASIC was out of favor with the academic community and that the AP exam for computer science assumed the students knew Pascal, so I persuaded the school board to purchase licenses for a Pascal compiler.

My memory of Pascal is that it was a pretty clear and clean language that resulted in easy-to-read programs. Unlike the “spaghetti-code” style of typical BASIC programs, it pretty much enforced structured programming. So, although I haven’t had any occasion to use Pascal since then, I have positive memories of it.