One small confession before we begin.
The first programming language I ever used was not Pascal. It was the built-in BASIC on the Atari 800XL home computer. At the time, in Egypt, that was what was available to many of us—mostly home computers imported from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, including the famous SAKHR Arabic computers.
Surprisingly, I wasn't introduced to Pascal until I was 39 years old.
Perhaps it was my own ignorance, or perhaps my attention had been captured by newer systems programming languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin. Whatever the reason, I now feel I discovered Pascal far later than I should have.
The more I write in Pascal, the more I appreciate its elegance. Its syntax is remarkably clean, easy to read, and easy to learn. In many ways, it almost reads like plain English—you feel as though you're simply having a conversation with the computer. That clarity is one of the reasons Pascal has remained a beloved teaching language for decades.
