>The compiler was decently fast (unlike Ada, anyone??? ;-) )
single pass, extremely smart implementation. Nothing of today known to me can compete.

>The Modula family seemed like the better direction; those were still Pascal-ish, but had nice intentional extensions so that they were not nearly so "impotent."

Turbo pascal adopted everything of value from Modula-2 making it completely redundant, thus borland never published the once announced Modula-2 compiler.

However we shouldn't look at the past as Freepascal is very cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Modula-2#Turbo_Modula-2