Comment by pjmlp
3 hours ago
The irony is that all wannabe C and C++ replacements are exactly the "Pascal model" brought back into the 21st century, go figure.
"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."
-- C.A.R Hoare's "The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture"
The thing for me at least is that when I looked at Pascal, MODULA-2, Ada, if you had complex data structures which had to allocate and deallocate memory, then those language would not help at all. They would allow you to make pointer mistakes. Pascal and MODULA-2 were also very restrictive in various area (no generics). Ada is better in that respect, but Ada compilers were rare.
In my opinion it is only Rust that offers a language without runtime system requirement and fixes essentially all of the problems of C.
First of all C did not had any generics, so same playing field.
C has a runtime, even if tiny. That is what calls into main(), handles floating point arithmetic when none is available, functions that run before and after main(), nowadays also does threading.
Heap memory handling in Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, is much safer than C, first of all no need to do math to calculate the right size, arenas are available on the standard library, dinamic allocation can also be managed by the compiler if desired (Ada), pointers are safe as they by default must be used with existing data, however if one really wants to do pointer arithmetic it is available.
The only issue that they have in regards to C, is the use-after-free, but that apparently isn't an issue for folks moving away from C into Zig, wich is basically Modula-2 with some C syntax flavour.