I think this is an important point - I had a year of Object Pascal as introductory programming by accident sort of - as I spent a year at another college. It was the last year they continued to use Object Pascal (moving on to Java, I believe). Having had some exposure to Java, C and assembler before - I felt Object Pascal made much more sense than C. Meaningfully higher level than assembly, and much easier to grasp the difference between reference/value/address than in C. I know what * and & means in C, but it just felt more natural in Pascal (it's been so long that I don't remember the particularity of the syntax/semantics ...).

Basic "original" Pascal is very much a teaching language first, and a "real" language second. But the small tweaks (or big, depending on your point of view) to Object Pascal/the default dialect for Free Pascal makes a world of difference IMNHO. So, I think someone can both agree that early Pascal (or plain Pascal) is uncomfortably verbose and rigid, while at the same time think that modern Free/Object Pascal is a great language to work with.

I wonder if there's anyone working on a Pascal back-end for Nim? In some ways is seems like a "waste" that the default target is C.