> Social factors, plus the more entrenched status of competing languages.

Pascal has been being killed for years, yet no one ever succeeded to really kill it.

Social factors (like the black campaign I mentioned), laziness of educators to switch to Modern Pascal environments (I have no idea why those people tend to stick to 20 years old Turbo Pascal, despite the fact they even need to patch and hack it to work with modern arch & OS), lack of universal standards (despite the fact the situation is more or less the same as C/C++ compilers, only a subset of the language is really portable), etc. FYI, some schools (European mostly and some Asian) went back to Pascal/Delphi after they thought they have produced incompetent programmers with other languages.

Competing languages will never kill Pascal, yet they usually learn from each other. There's a Pascal soul in Java, Ada, modern C/C++ (if you look how the standard grows, they incorportate Pascal securities more and more, except in places where it's not possible to do without breaking the language), etc.

Last but not least, as somewhere noted, Pascal will only die if its programmers let it die which doesn't seem about to happen in near future. Even other languages with much smaller community, say Euphoria, are well alive.