Pascal (and the entire family - Modula etc) is a language designed by a guy with an academic background in PLs. This shows in the design: e.g. the syntax is verbose and has a very rigid structure, which can often be frustrating to the user (like the need to declare all variables in a separate declaration block at the beginning of each function), but which makes it extremely easy to parse with just a single token lookahead. Similarly, the semantics are such that they're easy for a compiler to implement.

Borland still did a great job with their implementation performance-wise, and the legendary reputation of their Pascal compilers is well-deserved. But they had a solid foundation to build on in form of a tool-friendly language, which C++ just doesn't offer.