Title of a
paper written in
1981 by
Brian W. Kernighan (one of the co-authors of
The C Programming Language), and submitted to various
technical journals. The paper was rejected by journals, but widely
photocopied by various
bitter engineers who were fed up with using the language in their own projects.
Kernighan makes several good arguments against use of the Pascal, but focuses mainly on the strict casting restrictions of the language, its general non-portability, and its strange I/O interface. I do not know if these problems have since been worked around in subsequent specifications of the language since 1981.
Although the paper was not published in any technical journals after it was written, a search on google turned up over 10 separate HTML copies of the document on various servers. It seems to be a popular text in University courses on programming languages.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html is a good place to go for a well-formatted and hyperlinked version of the article.
Thanks to The Jargon File for giving me the heads-up on this.