Pascal at Apple
I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development.<p>But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just <i>try</i> to implement the following function in C without using the address-of operator:<p><pre><code>  struct list *head = (void *) 0;
  void push_back (struct list *entry) {
      struct list **p = &head;
      while (*p != 0) p = &p->next;
      *p = entry;
  }
</code></pre>
Pascal got better. But once you've switched to C, the sheer verbosity of Pascal is bothersome. Instead of "{" and "}" Pascal uses "begin" and "end". It uses "procedure" or "function" to introduce a function.<p>There's no going back, but I wish it was still available for learners. Java is comparable in terms of programmer safety, but has too much ridiculous boilerplate just to write "hello, world".