Pascal was a remarkably bad language that had tremendous amounts of computer-industry hype going for it for a number of years. Consequently programmers of a certain age (such as myself) are nearly immune to hype-- the latest and greatest uber-cool languages are sometimes useful, but often just a pain in the ass (like, say, Java?).

If you want to understand why Perl is so loosey-goosey, you need to understand how badly programming in Pascal sucked. The one is a reaction to the other.