[Japo]

That diference between subroutine and function was not original from Pascal, both Basic and Fortran had it, I guess it's a tradition created by the latter, but no language designed nowadays (outside the Basic family) keeps it. I never considered it didactic, on the contrary, when I moved from QBasic to C that was one of the things I was happy to see gone. Specially since most versions of most of these languages soon decided to allow you--just like C or other more modern ones, but with more awkward syntax--to call a function as a subroutine, discarding the return value.

Fubb, C++ is one of the languages hardest to understand, that's its major drawback, because its design process was a mess and it was constrained by being a superset of C. (Many languages do many things C++ does with far easier and more elegant syntax.) So if C++ is the language you work most with, I wouldn't worry about not understanding any language that you haven't seen before, that's just to be expected. And there's probably no reason for you to ever try Pascal.