history of programming
It turns out Pascal was a designated learning/teaching programming language. Doesn't it sound like a silly idea - why would anyone want a whole separate language just to learn and teach?
Every tool, and a programming language is a tool, comes with its own way to define and solve a problem. If we are going to teach people to analyze and think in a certain way, it better be a good way, a way that gets us to working solutions to non-trivial and practical problems.
Lots of people Pascal were learning Pascal thoroughly and well. Of course, in the process of learning they moved from toy exercises to writing what aspired to be production-quality code. Either Pascal would not have supported this task, or it would work. In the latter case Pascal would no longer be a pure teaching/learning tool, but rather a real instrument of a professional.
Of course, this is precisely what happened. Pascal offered a decent way to solve problems - and made a leap from the classroom to the real world and real problems.
- Jane Prusakova's blog
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The original Wirth version
The original Wirth version of Pascal as described in the textbook he wrote wasn't really a usable programming language for anything more than simplistic academic use. It was based on or at least greatly influenced by Algol, but stripped way down. That was fine for Wirth's original intentions as a teaching language. Unfortunately there was a dearth of (for those days) "modern" structured programming languages at the time (early to mid 1970s) that were small enough to implement on the lower end minicomputers of the time. Because of that, and because Pascal became popular in education so there were people who knew it, the computer and compiler vendors (and universities like UCSD) put out Pascal compilers. Unfortunately, every one of them had to add extensions to Wirth's Pascal to be good enough to be used to write useful programs. And in typical fashion, all of those extensions were different, and in some cases incompatible or very system specific. There was UCSD Pascal, VMS Pascal and eventually things like Turbo Pascal. Code written for one dialect was often difficult to port to other dialects unless it was very simple. Unfortunately it was years before standards bodies like ISO and ANSI addressed the problem, and by the time those standards started to be implemented by the compiler vendors, it was basically too late. By then Wirth himself had moved on, and had released Modula, Modula 2, Oberon, etc, to improve upon and address weaknesses in his earlier languages. And the industry had already shifted to C as the universal "lingua franca".