Note that most of the early Turbo Pascal features were actually from UCSD Pascal and Apple's Object Pascal, only after Turbo Pascal 5.5, most of the features were from Borland, and then influenced by C++.
Re:Pascal for Small Machines
by AnimalMuppet on Tuesday December 12, 2023 @09:32AM
(#38612591)
And people were seeing C in CS classes because it let you write the OS, which is part of what CS degrees wanted to teach. Pascal didn't really let you do that.
ISO Pascal not, ISO Extended Pascal, Concurrent Pascal USCD Pascal, Object Pascal certainly did, and several OSes do exist, that were written in them.
Ah, but Pascal dialects don't count.
In that case same applies to the C dialect, non ISO C compliant, full of compiler extensions as alternative to hand written Assembly, that is allowed in most kernels.
However the main point stands, most CS degrees used UNIX alongside the Lion's book, or Minix, thus strenghting C's position on this use case.
In the meantime standard K&R C was ubiquitous and anyone taking a CS degree would likely have learnt and used it. C's "close to the metal" approach was a good fit for the under-powered CPUs of the day.