Turbo Pascal was in the running with assembly language for my favorite language to program the IBM PC in the 1980s. ISO Pascal didn't have the facilities to do systems programming, like trapping an interrupt, but Turbo Pascal did. Even BASIC had PEEK and POKE which are unsafe but let you target hardware registers.
I fell out of the Pascal habit when I got to college because Turbo wasn't available for the Sun 68k and SPARC not to mention HP PA RISC workstations we had and soon I got my first 32-bit "home" computer and was using Linux so of course I switched to C, though I think mostly it was a step back.
I fell out of the Pascal habit when I got to college because Turbo wasn't available for the Sun 68k and SPARC not to mention HP PA RISC workstations we had and soon I got my first 32-bit "home" computer and was using Linux so of course I switched to C, though I think mostly it was a step back.