I have always liked Pascal. The language can be represented in BNF in a page or two. I have never seen C represented in BNF, but friends who have developed compilers said that it is hairy. That makes a language much more difficult to master, and the programmer is much more prone to making errors.

In terms of IDEs, I think that many of the older languages got things right (including THINK and Borland). Back then, IDEs were truly integrated. Modern IDEs don't feel very integrated. Indeed, the typical case with modern IDEs seems to be that the "IDE" is little more than a front end for disparate utilities. Granted, I don't recall the THINK Pascal debugger being all that great.

With respect to how primitive the editor was in THINK Pascal, well, I liked it. I am very much a person who believe that a software tool should have the necessary features, and not a single one more. That is to say that a C editor should be a C editor, and not a Pascal editor (never mind a LaTeX editor). While Pascal and C are very similar langauges, they never the less have their own quirks and their own philosopies for editing and presentation. Never mind something that is radically different, like stack based languages (such as forth), or something intended for typesetting (like LaTeX). So, in my mind, the THINK Pascal IDE strikes a good balance.