They argue that learning Pascal requires students to spend too much brainpower on the syntax of a language than on the essentials of programming .
They want to protect students from losing most of the fun in programming by getting too deeply involved in secondary things like the syntax and rules of a specific programming language.
They also believe that Pascal as a programming language is less expressive than Scheme , imposing on students too many limits thus demanding from them to spend much of their intellectual energy coping with the idiosyncracies of a language instead of letting them concentrate on the solution of a given problem.
The use of Scheme on the contrary will liberate students initially from lower level thinking that is influenced by the implementation of a programming language and will take them up to the heights of thinking in terms of higher levels of abstraction making programming simpler, more comprehensive and more powerful.
Georg P. Loczewski 2004-03-05