Well, I'm feeling a little intimidated by my seniors here - it seems everyone else in this forum has been programming in Comal for longer than I've been alive! [Give it time, Iain - ed.]
I first started programming in Acorn COMAL (then later in UniComal) at High School. Until then, my language of choice was Basic on the ZX Spectrum. Comal opened up all sorts of novel ideas to me, including variable names with more than one letter, procedures with parameters, and recursion.
I'm now finishing third year Computer Science. Since high school, I've written games, an art package (for Sixth Year Studies), various different forms of GUI (on the downloads page), and an assortment of DOS utilities, all written in UniComal. I've moved on to writing in C++ and Java (and Blitz Basic on the Amiga), but still use UniComal a lot of the time. This is mainly because I'll think of some handy little program to do some simple task, which won't need the power provided by C++. Java is about the nicest language I've used, but with UniComal I can sit down and knock out a program in a matter of minutes, because all the necessary objects are already there. There's no faffing around looking for the correct files to Import, and virtually no planning is needed. This is UniComal's great strength - it's not the most elegant choice, and has nowhere near enough power for systems work, but as a language for the beginner to use it is almost on the level of writing batch files. Very powerful batch files. It also lends itself well to experimentation, for the same reasons. Whenever I've just read about something I want to try out, UniComal provides an easy way to do so. Plasmas and Gaskets have sprung up in a ridiculously small number of code lines.
As a teaching language it is perhaps lacking - for the fundamental idea of programming, the machine executes one instruction after another, it works - but with Object Oriented ( and even Framework) languages coming into predominance it is lacking in their basics.
That's about it - I've only been writing in UniComal for about six years. It is a natural progression from Basic, and is probably a good stepping stone from Basic towards Pascal, or even C. I know I'll be using it for a long time to come (even if it can't handle long file names). [But see "longfile.zip" and "buttbrow.zip" in the downloads section - Ed.]
Edited 20-Oct-2001