They argue that learning Pascal requires students to spend too much brainpower on the syntax of a language than on the essentials of programming .
They want to protect students from losing most of the fun in programming by getting too deeply involved in secondary things like the syntax and rules of a specific programming language.
They also believe that Pascal as a programming language is less expressive than Scheme , imposing on students too many limits thus demanding from them to spend much of their intellectual energy coping with the idiosyncracies of a language instead of letting them concentrate on the solution of a given problem.
The use of Scheme on the contrary will liberate students initially from lower level thinking that is influenced by the implementation of a programming language and will take them up to the heights of thinking in terms of higher levels of abstraction making programming simpler, more comprehensive and more powerful.