[wiz21c]

Pascal is definitely a very good language for teaching the basic of procedural/imperative programming. It has several good properties : it teaches you structured data (which helps to understand formalization), is strongly typed (which helps to reduce the uncertainty about the behavior of a program which in turn helps student to understand what they do precisely); you don't have to face pointers (which in my own experience are tough to understand); etc.

[ckok]

But when you need them, pointers are there

[wiz21c]

Ah maybe I'm a bit orthodox here :-) But you're right. At least in Turbo Pascal, there were pointers and super nice in line assembly language.

[mixmastamyk]

I learned pointers in my first semester of CS with ^Pascal, and glad I did because the syntax was more readable.