I really like Pascal as a language and Turbo Pascal in particular was an amazing piece of work. It was uncommonly user friendly for such a powerful piece of software running on the limited hardware of the time. The context sensitive help was terrific. Also amazingly fast, especially with self contained units. Visual Studio on a modern multicore multiGHz PC makes me wait longer for a build than Turbo Pascal did on my 486 or in some cases even my earlier 386.

As a single pass compiler I remember how fast it was. Turbo Pascal would compile and stop on the first error. Simple. Other pascal compilers of the era would keep going trying to fix missing ; and often leading to error messages that were bizarre - especially to students.

I’d do my school assignments in turbo pascal and then upload and port to the Data General mini Pascal compiler. Was just 10000 times faster to do as long as I didn’t use anything PC specific I was gold