Learning to Program with Pascal

Isn't Pascal a dead language?  Why would anyone learn to program with Pascal?  Well, companies known well to me that used Pascal in the past gave it up for the C language.  But C might not be the best first language to learn programming, at least not for everyone.  However, it is not really dead.  It was extended into Object Pascal and renamed to Delphi, which is popular within the community of Delphi programmers.

People really liked Turbo Pascal.  You can still download free copies of old Pascal documentation from this website:
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/borland/turbo_pascal/
You can get the Turbo Pascal Object-Oriented Programming Guide and the Turbo Tutor (Version 2.0).  You can teach yourself both Pascal and programming with these manuals.  The Turbo Tutor even covers advanced data structures and the topics of sorting and searching.

You can get a free compiler for Free Pascal at this website:  http://www.freepascal.org/
Free Pascal has a Delphi-compatible mode.  You can buy Delphi from Embarcadero

(http://www.embarcadero.com/), a California company, so Pascal is definitely not dead.  I recently purchased a book on genetic algorithms and there is sample code in the book written in Pascal.  And here I thought I would never see this language again and I discarded my Pascal book!  I am fortunate the language is easy to read and that lovers of Turbo Pascal have saved the documentation as though it is sacred script.  Actually, the genetic algorithm book has a tutorial in the appendix. 

Here is a link to a piece of humor about "the sons of Kahn," meaning Philippe Kahn, the founder of Borland.  (The reference in this humorous article to the valley of the Scotts is Silicon Valley, the Scotts reference is to the Macintosh and Apple.)

In summary, Pascal is a good candidate for a first programming language.  Professional programming in Pascal lives on in the form of Delphi programming, but it is a niche market.  Pascal syntax can be simplified and used as pseudocode for software design documents.

Pascal is not as simple as Basic and not as powerful C.  It is in the middle and has been squeezed into a small position in today's programming world, but it is not gone, and not forgotten.

Robert