[int_19h]

C and C++ are still horrible languages even if you want to teach those concepts, because of how many footguns they have. That's why Pascal was so popular as a teaching language, historically speaking - it still has pointers and other stuff you need for manual memory management, but it's much simpler and more regular both syntactically and semantically.

[zabzonk]

no, it has exactly the same issues as c and c++, and some of its own, such as arrays of different sizes being different types. guess why it isn't used anymore

[int_19h]

Arrays of different sizes are different types in C, as well - this is obvious when you are dealing with pointer-to-array types.

That aside, Pascal removes a lot of UB and other footguns by forcing explicitness for e.g. casts and pointer arithmetic, or providing (verifiably safe) byref argument separately from raw pointers. Strings and arrays are a mess in standard Pascal, which is why everybody used dialects that solved them - most notably Borland's, of course, which was used for a lot of DOS and early Win32 software.

Anyway, I'm not suggesting Pascal specifically today. The point is that C and C++ were never good teaching languages, which is why something else was usually used as one whether we look at 80s, 00s, or today.