[vessenes]

That's such an interesting essay -- some of the complaints seem so egregious, it's no wonder Pascal didn't take off. All of the complaints seem (to my eyes) very reasonable. The high points:

No closures, so global vars everywhere

No breaks in flow control, it's goto (deprecated) or nothing

Strongly typed, but arrays of different lengths are different types.

Casting types is not possible

A number of annoying order-of-code requirements

"and" and "or" have no guaranteed precedence or order of operation..(!)

Those are enough to make me want to hurl the compiler against a wall.

[munificent]

    > No breaks in flow control, it's goto (deprecated) or nothing
    > Strongly typed, but arrays of different lengths are different types.
    > Casting types is not possible

Those are real frustrations, but, at the same time, they help avoid many of the security and safety issues that have plagued C for decades.

It's not clear if there's a language somewhere between Pascal that's less annoying but more safe while still being simple. But I think it is pretty clear that there is a real trade-off in either direction.

C doesn't get in your way when you know you're doing like Pascal does. But it also doesn't get in the way when you don't know what you're doing.

[vessenes]

I think Go has a reasonably good story about each of those three items actually; you can create an array of specific length as a type (and name it if you like), or you can create a slice, which does not have length requirements.

Flow control is significantly better, and supports goto style semantics when you need them.

Casting is liberally warned against (unsafe.*), but available when needed.

[Avshalom]

Well I mean, there's Pascal, which solves all three of those gripes.