> Pascal was the introductory computer language at my college in 1988. I don't remember much of it.

I took Pascal as a college freshman in 1982. And even though I haven't programmed in it seriously since then, it stuck with me. It didn't hurt that it was a minimal language designed for teaching computer science. For example, when I learned Pascal, there was no string type; you had to create an array of characters.

I was checking out the Free Pascal website recently; although the language has been greatly expanded, Free Pascal source code still made sense to me.