Pascal

When Niklaus Wirth designed Pascal in 1970, it was intended to be a successor to Algol. It flourished during the 1970s, not least because of ETH's implementation, which compiled Pascal to "p-code" rather than machine code. Since p-code was simpler to translate than Pascal, this facilitated the porting of the language to new platforms. That, and the early appearance of a Pascal implementation on Apple II, gave Pascal two early boosts. Borland's Turbo Pascal for the PC was a third important fillip. Nevertheless, Pascal almost died in the 1980s thanks to the popularity of C and, later, C++. It did, however, become Borland's language of choice for their GUI development tool, Delphi.

Because of its simplicity and structure, Pascal makes an ideal teaching language. If you want to learn programming, you could start at worse places than Pascal. It's a bit restrictive and can be frustrating, but the discipline is good for you. And when you eventually move to a less restrictive language, hopefully a little of that discipline will remain deep in your psyche, curbing your wilder and less debuggable excesses. That's the idea, anyway, and that's why Pascal is often used for teaching. Delphi aside for a moment, I don't think it is generally used in the industry. Certainly I've never encountered it myself in the "real world" (but then I haven't gone looking for it - my career developed along other lines).

I've written the briefest of brief reviews of "Programming with Pascal" (Konvalina & Wileman, McGraw-Hill, 1987) - where you will also find a link to Pascal solutions to some of the exercises.