The continuing hard drive worries.

Depends on your pascal... turbo/delphi style pascals can get just as down and dirty as C if you want.

The original language in its "teaching" version is very limited. It does support IO, but has little concept of permanent files etc.

Something like the ancient Turbo Pascal 3 for DOS supported all 26 standard built in functions, and then added another 500 odd to do real work with ;-)

Sure it was turbo? Since its trivially easy in any PC based version of turbo pascal (it supports free union variant records, generic pointers, dynamic C style memory allocation, untyped arrays or "array of byte" style constructs, and it quite happy to let you index beyond the end of arrays etc so long as you turn off range checking). I have never tried one of the older CP/M versions though.

(you may well have had difficulties in other more "standard" flavours of pascal like Prospero or UCSD etc)

well in fact I discovered they couldn't.

No offence intended, but perhaps you couldn't get them to do it at the time, but they certainly can...

(I have done device drivers, interrupt handlers, real time code, down and dirty bit aligned comms code, IP routing, and all sorts in delphi and turbo pascal before that)