Me too! I graduated, in a manner of speaking, from FORTRAN, which had no recursion and pointers to Pascal.

Looking back I believe Pascal was the perfect language to learn those two fundamental and tricky concepts. It felt aesthetically pleasing and struck just the right balance between the terse (and sometimes quirky) C and verbose COBOL.

When I coded up those graph algorithms in Pascal I felt “happy” in a way that can’t be explained and which I didn’t experience in C.

Similar experience, I think it boils down to little details handling pointers that are out of reach in C, like reference parameters.

Sure you can emulate them with double pointer indirection, which is anyway what the compiler does, but it adds more cognitive overhead.

Me too! Pascal has a natural "flow" that I lost when I transitioned to C.

Yes, I prefer it over C if I had to program in any of these languages. It feels higher level despite it really isn't very much, just a smidge that will often not matter technically, however it will for a developer.

Me too, with a lot of help from Herbert Schildt books.