I remember a very experienced and highly respected programmer say "Wow. This record construct could be really useful!"
( I don't recall her ever doing anything other than assembler before that - HP-2100 ...)
I've seen "systems programmers"- basically glorified operators- boggled by assembler. Until an older colleague pulled a reference card out of her drawer.
A few years ago, I requested here, that FPC be modified to allow undeclared counter/index vars in procedures and functions as in Ada. People beat the crap out of me - you may have been one of them! Still seems like a good idea to me!
Probably not me. (a) I've only been using the forum for a year, before that I used the mailing lists. (b) While I don't like undeclared variables, I believe that declaring the index variable inside a for..do would be an advance since the current situation where the index value is undefined on loop termination (unless by break) is most unpleasant.
I did write some Modula-2 (Borland) back OUAT ... I seem to recall it was a university class for an easy A. (I never went to class so I think I hit a B- on that...). In those (DOS) days it was pretty tedious IIRC as one had to edit the unit interface file separately from the implementation. So main, units (interface), units (implementation). That was a loooong time ago though. I might have preferred it over Pascal if editing wasn't so tedious. Then TP 4 came out with Units and - wow! What an improvement.
Borland Modula-2 became TopSpeed. There were various "goings on" that I can't discuss because if I get the details wrong they'd be libellous.
Having separate definition files in M2 has the advantage that (a) they can be marked as read-only to all but senior staff and (b) they can be written as a "statement of fact" with no indication of implementation details... there's a legal storm brewing because C (etc.) specifically doesn't have that separation.
I believe, had Wirth simply extended Pascal with concepts from Modula-2, that Ada could have begun there...
Remember that Wirth was on one of the Ada teams or on the approvals committee, and eyebrows were raised since he was the only one being paid.
There was a great deal of dodginess that led to Pascal, but basically I believe that Wirth rushed it out with the specific intention of breaking compatibility with ALGOL-60. It was completely unforgivable that Pascal had the "dangling else" problem when that was fixed in ALGOL-68, Wirth obviously fixed that in Modula-2 but Pascal was a rush job... look at Wirth's early coding style and you'd see why.
I do seem to recall buying stuff from Logitech and getting 'bonus packs' of s/w of all sorts...
Although the various addon packs sounds more like a TopSpeed thing, and they were of decidedly mixed quality. Logitech had a Mouse Programmer's Toolkit which effectively gave you a large chunk of a Windows-like OS as source, and they had a damn good debugger which was subsequently spun off as Multiscope.
They also had their own share of scandals which I can't discuss. For a while I was their de-facto UK tech support.
MarkMLl