Thanks for all the suggestions!
I'm going to investigate all of them as time allows. I must say that Eiffel would most certainly expand my mind. My initial reaction, when
looking at a "Hello World!" program, was "No way!". I had just read
some of SICP and "Pascal is for building pyramids imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms imposing, breathtaking, dynamic structures built by squads fitting fluctuating myriads of simpler organisms into place." sprang to mind, with Eiffel replacing Pascal in this quote. Attempting to be fair, I surfed over to eiffel.com. Eiffel has a lot of "high-minded" concepts, and it's easy for a rookie, such as myself, to become inundated. Ironically, while watching Eiffel.com's presentation of "Design by Contract", my Gnome desk top's control-panel crashed with a segmentation fault error (seconds before the spill about how reliable DBC made Eiffel). Much I could learn from Eiffel.
SICP was another invaluable suggestion! MIT uses it as part of their OpenCourse program, so now I have a complete and free course in addition to this excellent text. Thank you.
I will inspect Fortran, Mozart/Oz, Erlang, AliceML, and all other recommendations. Thanks again for the help. Perhaps I will be able to contribute to the Python community soon.
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