Pascal is an amazing lauguage to learn with. You can pick up OO concepts as well! Much to my dismay, schools are using Turing as a starter. This sickens me. Turing (IMO) is nothing more than a hacked-together language consisting of BASIC and Pascal. I say leave BASIC for the young'uns and start with Pascal.
Then do what I did...dive straight in to ANSI C.
Followed, closely, by Java...without an IDE of any sort. Just a text editor and javac.
I've read that Borland intends to put out free versions of their compilers in the near future...Turbo Pascal (redubbed Delphi) included. And I do believe they're repackaging the old DOS compilers as well.