​And that was the problem... DEC did not market good tools besides assembler and FTN for RT and RSX.   3rd parties like Oregon SW and Whitesmiths' eventually produced good Pascal and C implementation respectfully.   But, like you, most people I knew, and in my own experience; nothing but asm and FTN was there.

Paul can correct me, but I don't think DEC even developed a Pascal for TOPS originally - IIRC the one I used came from the universities.   I think the first Pascal sold was targeted for the VAX.  Also, RT11 and RSX were 'laboratory' systems and those systems were dominated by Fortran back in the day - so DEC marketing thought in those terms.

I remember that CMU's Mellon Institute built an automated realtime newspaper sorting/delivery system for the Pittsburgh Press and a number of other newspapers and ended up using FORTRAN - because that's all they had for RT11 that they trusted (thankfully that project started after I had left, although I helped with the bidding and assessment). We had wanted to use BLISS but that meant cross compiling from the 10's and the customer wanted the system self hosting as I recall. By the time the Mellon folks completed the project, OMSI's Pascal compiler for RT11 was available, but the water was under the bridge.

​Yep - but as others have pointed out, with something like RATFOR it could be made usable and that's what a lot of people I know did when they had too.   As I said, the FPS folks wrote a parallelizing, Fortran for the FPS-164 in Ratfor A compiler, to me, is the definition if a character based application if I can name one.