Comment by pjmlp

His critice was already outdated by 1978, because Modula-2, Pascal's sucessor, explicitly designed for systems programming, after Niklaus Wirth sabatical year at Xerox PARC, where he learned about Mesa, Xerox Star written in Mesa, the IDE like experience of Tajo and XDE, he came back to ETHZ and created Modula-2, Lilith personal workstation and related OS in Modula-2.

Modula-2, designed for memory safe systems programming, in 1978, succedding Pascal, had support for unbounded arrays and strings.

By the way, GCC nowadays has GNU Modula-2 integrated in the official set of supported languages.