The programming language Pascal has become the dominant language of instruction in computer science education.  It has also strongly influenced languages developed subsequently, in particular Ada.

Pascal was originally intended primarily as a teaching language, but it has been more and more often recommended as a language for serious programming as well, for example, for system programming tasks and even operating systems.

Pascal, at least in its standard form, is just plain not suitable for serious programming.  This paper discusses my personal discovery of some of the reasons why.