I remember learning Pascal (Free Pascal) and Lazarus soon after. First attempts was in 2003. I remember writing a decent name parsing (Prefix, First, Middle, Last, Suffix) routine in Free Pascal. Below, timings for a million records.
bill@bill-MS-7B79:~/Mystuff/Pascal> time ./nameparse
Enter Input file :
Enter Output file :
1000001 records read.
real 0m4.016s
user 0m1.962s
sys 0m0.983s
bill@bill-MS-7B79:~/Mystuff/Pascal>