The main problem with Pascal was not having a standard at a time when having a standard was important for adoption. There were several successful implementations like Borland's, and the version used in the Macintosh, but being closed products they never talked to each other. It's similar to the situation of Basic: lots of code was created in Basic but none was compatible with a standard and was essentially lost.
Not just having a standard but being able to collectively evolve a standard.
In the absence of that, Pascal’s creators and commercializers invented follow-on languages, including the most successful thread via Hejlsberg as we’re discussing here: Object Pascal -> Delphi -> C#/.NET—with a brief detour to J++, which I don’t know enough about to understand if it belongs in this sequence.
Outside Borland and Apple, people tend to forget that already in 1976, Niklaus Wirth came up with Modula-2, exactly to fix all the shortcomings from a language originally designed for teaching, with one properly designed for systems programing from the start.
As for your sequence, from someone that was around back then, .NET and C# only exist as you know it thanks to Sun's lawsuit regarding Java language and runtime extensions introduced in J++.
Then an internal research language originally named Cool, became C#, the language extensions in J++ were made into C# features (events, J/Direct, COM interop), Windows Foundation Classes became Windows Forms, and J# was released in .NET 1.0 as transiton technology.
Had it not been for the lawsuit, Ext-VOS (.NET codename) would have been released with J++ instead.
It certainly had a standard, two actually, however no one cared because Turbo Pascal was more relevant, and Modula-2 was designed to fix Pascal's shortcomings, which also has a ISO standard.
In the absence of that, Pascal’s creators and commercializers invented follow-on languages, including the most successful thread via Hejlsberg as we’re discussing here: Object Pascal -> Delphi -> C#/.NET—with a brief detour to J++, which I don’t know enough about to understand if it belongs in this sequence.
As for your sequence, from someone that was around back then, .NET and C# only exist as you know it thanks to Sun's lawsuit regarding Java language and runtime extensions introduced in J++.
Then an internal research language originally named Cool, became C#, the language extensions in J++ were made into C# features (events, J/Direct, COM interop), Windows Foundation Classes became Windows Forms, and J# was released in .NET 1.0 as transiton technology.
Had it not been for the lawsuit, Ext-VOS (.NET codename) would have been released with J++ instead.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...
Follow the linked paper for Ext-VOS, aka COM+ Runtime, aka .NET.
Microsoft would revisit this COM+ Runtime a decade later with WinRT,
https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...
So it wasn't for lack of standard per se.