The first compilers I owned (bought with my own teenager cash!) were Personal Pascal and then Megamax Modula-2, for my Atari ST. I only learned C later, in high school. I had such fantasies of programming such fantastic interesting things that of course never got made.
I shelled out large chunks of hard earned chore cash (sorting bottles for bottle depot recycling, mowing lawn, etc.) to get these (second hand copies). Probably over $200 in today's $$ when accounting for inflation
Similar story for me. The first compiler I bought with my own money was Benchmark Modula-2 for the Amiga. There weren't any (that I was aware of) free compilers for the Amiga at the time and I couldn't afford the C compiler.
It was quite the adventure learning how to program an Amiga with, effectively, a pile of header files, but I had a great time.
The manual for Benchmark Modula-2 (which, IIRC, is all it came with) is in Archive.org.[0]
Yeah the real problem with Modula 2 on the Atari (and I imagine this held for the Amiga as well) was that the OS syscalls were really built for C. And all the documentation was for C.
On the Atari, in GEM, there's just a boatload of C unions used for UI elements. And void pointers galore. So not friendly to Wirth style languages which have very strict static typing rules.
That and getting documentation in those days was also a nightmare. Everything was in books/manuals, and it's not like you could just get them from Amazon or even a local bookshop. And books were expensive. And it's not like my Modula 2 compiler manual had good documentation on the OS syscalls, etc. It didn't even include a real full set of bindings.
Somewhere out there there's an ST Format issue with a printed letter from my 14-year old Canadian rural-living self begging for help finding documentation on the Line A graphics calls for the ST.
Coupled with compiling with a floppy based system because hard drives were unaffordable. Challenges.
By the time I got my hands on a C compiler and decent documentation I had moved onto Linux on my 486. The 90s were very much a different era from the 80s!
That was a bit was helped me jumping from Turbo Pascal to Turbo C++ side of the fence back on those days, but on the Windows 3.x world.
It wasn't no longer like on MS-DOS where all language had the same capabilites accessing BIOS and MS-DOS interrupts, rather if Borland hadn't provided the external bindings to Windows APIs, someone had to write them.
Whereas using C++, alongside OWL, gave me the nice language features I came to love from Object Pascal, a framework similar in usage like Turbo Vision, with bounded checked strings, arrays, collection types, and all the Win16 was one #include away.
I shelled out large chunks of hard earned chore cash (sorting bottles for bottle depot recycling, mowing lawn, etc.) to get these (second hand copies). Probably over $200 in today's $$ when accounting for inflation
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