&gt; I have a hard time even thinking of it as a systems language, since systems languages tend to be full of punctuation, whereas Pascal makes pretty heavy use of keywords.<p>Judging whether it&#x27;s a systems language by keywords vs punctuations?  Seriously?<p>&gt; does this seriously predate C and share the same problem space?<p>Some people thought it could share the same problem space, but it was primarily intended to be a teaching language.  It turned out that it wasn&#x27;t as suited for real work as some people thought.<p>&gt; Granted, I don’t know enough about Pascal from one toy program to fairly compare it to C. Kind of curious what the story is, though.<p>The story is, when you quit having toy problems, Pascal&#x27;s limitations got in your way much more than C&#x27;s limitations did.