[pjmlp]

If the reason was to avoid those checks, then people really don't know better.

Turbo Pascal => {$R-}

Ada => pragma Suppress (Index_Check);

Modula-3 => cm3 -A

D => dmd -fnoboundscheck / array.ptr[index] in @system code

Just a few examples. Additionally there are lots of research how to remove bounds checking in compiler optimizations

http://citeseer.uark.edu:8080/citeseerx/showciting;jsessioni...

What C has going for it is the symbiotic relationship with UNIX, 40 years of optimizations in most compilers and the historical baggage of being around for so long.

Other better languages suffered from having been shown the door as UNIX spread into the enterprise, but there was a time when C compilers didn't generate better code as the other ones.