[SwellJoe]

Pascal was the teaching language of choice in the US for a very long time. My high school AP (advanced classes that provided college credit) programming classes were taught with Pascal, after the introductory class using BASIC. But, I was in high school a long time ago, and programming was taught on Apple II computers (there were some IIe computers in the lab, as well). I don't think there's widespread Pascal usage for teaching in the US today, and I don't think I would campaign for bringing it back.

I'm not sure what took its place in high schools, now that I think of it, as I'm so far removed from it.

[icelancer]

Pascal was on the way out when I was in HS (I'm 32) but it was still kicking in the form of Delphi during the VB wars (then VB4). I have fond memories of it.

It's mostly Java now, BTW.

[SwellJoe]

I guess if kids learn Java, and still love programming after that, they've got what it takes to be programmers in the real world.

But, I don't think I'd set out to punish kids for wanting to learn programming by making them use something that has so much tedious boilerplate and verbosity. Then again, you can actually make real things with Java; everything from games (Minecraft) to the web (sort of) to apps (most Android apps) to OS programming (Android, itself) is reasonably do-able. So, the empowerment level is high. It just seems like something more immediate would be preferable, at least for the first class (to parallel the use of BASIC in my day; maybe Python would be a good choice, since it can be used for real projects, too).

[emptyfile]

I'm not from the US, but in my high school Pascal was taught up until a few years ago when they switched to Python. Other schools here usually teach C.