Comment by porlw

Pascal gets a bad rap, but that's due to the limitations of the original "pure" language. Something like Turbo Pascal which took features from Modula-2 is actually be a very good alternative to C for systems programming.

- Stricter type checking than C, (e.g. an error to add a centigrade value to a Fahrenheit value without casting)

- Bounds checked arrays and strings

Turbo Pascal added:

- Selectively turn off bounds checking for performance

- Inline assembler

- Pointers and arbitrary memory allocation

I don't think there's anything you can do in C that you can't do in TP. For example, it was easy to write code that hung off the timer or keyboard interrupts in MSDOS, which is pretty low level stuff.

The important thing is that the safe behaviour should be the default, you have to mark unsafe areas of code explicitly. This is the opposite to how it works with C.