Pedagogically oriented computer science profs circa 1980 were aghast that BASIC had become the standard for teaching young people to program. It was difficult to fit Pascal into a microcomputer then, so we were stuck with the atrocious UCSD Pascal [1] which used a virtual machine to make up for the weak instruction sets of many micros, particularly the 6502. Since the compiler ran inside the VM, compiling a small Pascal program was like compiling a large C++ program today.
Not long after that I got to use Pascal on a VAX which was not so bad, but pretty obviously not up to doing systems programming, particularly compared to C, which was starting to show up on micros such as Z-80s running CP/M and the TRS-80 Color Computer running OS-9.
Then I got a 80286 computer and I really liked Turbo Pascal because it added the (non-standard) facilities you need to do systems work, but went back to C when I went to school because it was portable to the 68k and SPARC based Sun machines we had.
> compared to C, which was starting to show up on micros such as Z-80s running CP/M
I had some very limited access to CP/M z80 machines. Probably somewhere between 86-90. All I remember about the C compiler they had is that I had to swap 2 or 3 floppies to produce a linked executable, so it sounds similar to this UCSD Pascal.
My first real contact with Pascal was Turbo Pascal, and that ran loops around any other compiler I had access to back then...
I had a Coco with 2 floppies, I could compile C without any swapping. OS-9 was a real multitasking operating system, I could log into it with the keyboard and mouse and two serial ports at the same time (one with a UART, another with the terrible bit banger) The latter wasn't too bad with the portable DEC printing terminal I got that that was surplus at a credit agency.
UCSD Pascal was one of very few compiled languages you could get for the Apple ][ and other 6502 machines because the virtual machine was an answer to problem of code generation for that terrible instruction set with insufficient registers and addressing modes.
Pascal is less esoteric and has had that forever.