while many may not realise what a treat i have for you today, those who were forced to write Pascal programs in school might actually find this interesting: in 1981, Brian W. Kernihan's essay Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language was turned down by the technical journals, but xeroxes circulated widely. especially if you progressed to othe rlanguages after leaning the basics with pascal, you will understand---and might be surprised---that you can't do anything serious in this language. you just never recognised its limitations while you didn't know anything else you could have compared it to. everything seemed just so natural.