Turbo Pascal 7 will always hold a special place in that code construct of my heart. It was the first compilable language I was able to get my hands on as a teen, having used stuff like Basic and QBasic for ages beforehand. It was even more special to me to be able to learn at the time because it was the same language Legend of the Red Dragon was written in. And if it was good enough for Seth Able, it was good enough for me. Not to mention, it meant I would be able to write IGMs (In-Game Modules) for his games.
The language was often ridiculed at the time by the more elitist folks, particularly for its performance due to the amount of overhead that could end up in your code (mostly depending on what you were doing and how you did it). It had a proper String type, for example. But there was literally nothing you couldn't do to improve performance, all the way down to the native support for including blocks of assembly code (since it was made by Borland, who did everything from Turbo Assembler to Turbo C). I literally learned how to use I/O ports, hardware memory addressing, and assembly thanks to what some would have referred to as a junk language.
Being made by Borland, you could count on an extensive built-in help feature as well. I would literally sit there sometimes and just read through the different entries for different functions or topics, excited to learn new things to do or different ways to do them. You just can't learn languages like that anymore. Nothing I've seen since has ever been as good as the help in most of the old Borland products.
Eventually I moved to C and that was that, but I still consider Pascal to be a great language to learn with. These days they call it Delphi, but I never looked at it again by that point. The closest I came was when I used the knowledge I have today to completely disassemble and analyze/label the assembly code for LORD, just to see what secrets or interesting things I could find. Even from that I learned new stuff, like how the old code overlay files used to work. But not even
Free Pascal could pull me back in after all this time.