That never happened. At least, not in my circles. The progression was typically Basic of some variety (whatever your system shipped with), peek & poke, machine code, assembler and later on either C or Turbo pascal assuming enough time had passed.

Pascal on 8 bit was just too damn slow compared to the alternatives to be very useful and compile times were horrendous. Even the university students that had access to Pascal compilers for the most part only used them to turn in their assignments and avoided it for everything else.

I did a little contest with a friend: we both wrote a chess program, he wrote his state of the art with a ton of optimizations in Pascal, I wrote mine in assembler. His program never stood a chance against a very simplistic implementation that only had minimax and a greedy (strictly material based) evaluation routine.

Good times :)