[antimagic]

Hah :) I was expecting you to come back with something about typecasting, which Pascal, as conceived by Wirth, was determined to make as difficult as possible, if not flatout impossible. This limitation made writing performant software in standard Pascal quite difficult. Which is why most of the popular Pascal implementations provided extensions to make it possible to use Pascal for real problems. I'm thinking notably of MPW Pascal, which was used to write much of the system software for early Macs.

[analog31]

You guessed right. And after I made that pronouncement to myself about C, I kinda lost touch with the programming community, as Turbo Pascal and my programming skills got me through college and gradual school in physics. When I finally came back up for air, of course C had won out, but programming a graphical platform with a low level language seemed too hard, and I reverted to higher level tools such as HyperCard, Visual Basic, and today, Python.