pascal was fine
It's manifest nonsense to say that "Pascal was useless", unless you're reading the textbook and forgetting that practical implementations were modified for engineering use.
"Whitesmiths Pascal" was particularly common. It was a bodge, running on VMS and cross-compiling for 68000 targets via a couple of intermediate stages one of which was C. It wouldn't have been my personal choice, and I didn't much "like" Whitesmiths, but there was a lot to like in Pascal, and a lot to learn for people with open minds.