[stg22]

Also, Pascal is a direct descendant of a very, very old language (ALGOL-58 from 1958). In the 1950s, HLL compilation was at the extreme edge of what computers were capable of doing and a key goal of language design was (or should have been - cough COBOL cough) to make it as efficient as possible.

By the time Ken Thompson was designing languages, hardware had improved a lot and he could make compilation efficiency a lower priority.

[timbit42]

Technically, ALGOL-58 lead to ALGOL-60 which led to ALGOL X (1966) then to ALGOL W (1966) and then to Pascal (1970). X and W were proposals by Nicklaus Wirth and Tony Hoare as successors to ALGOL 60.