"How on earth did C win out over this?" - here's some guy's take on, if not exactly this question, matters that may be related: <a href="https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html</a><p>My own memory is similar - Pascal was just generally annoying to use, in various little ways, that added up over time. On the face of it, it seems like it should be a lot better than C, but in practice... it just wasn't.
> Cool. I’m glad to see Pascal has adopted Rust’s approach of putting the type last, so you can actually see at a glance what the variable names are.<p>I'm guessing (hoping) this is irony...
> I have a hard time even thinking of it as a systems language, since systems languages tend to be full of punctuation, whereas Pascal makes pretty heavy use of keywords.<p>Judging whether it's a systems language by keywords vs punctuations? Seriously?<p>> does this seriously predate C and share the same problem space?<p>Some people thought it could share the same problem space, but it was primarily intended to be a teaching language. It turned out that it wasn't as suited for real work as some people thought.<p>> Granted, I don’t know enough about Pascal from one toy program to fairly compare it to C. Kind of curious what the story is, though.<p>The story is, when you quit having toy problems, Pascal's limitations got in your way much more than C's limitations did.