When I took the CS AP test in 1997 it was in Pascal. It was shortly changed to C++ and then was switched to the current Java. Most of my college CS (1998-2002) courses were in C, including first year courses. As it turned out my senior thesis was a Pascal compiler written in C that targeted the early JVM. Man I should have stuck with that, but my conclusion at the time was, while it was easy to target, the JVM was just too much baggage to carry around.

Personally, I think Pascal was a great choice for those high school courses.