Someone should make a front-end (preprocessor?) for Ada or a Pascal with braces et.al. Then publish it as a brand new systems programming language. (Optional: "inspired by Go".)
When I got to use C, the first thing I did was macros for new() and dispose() as wrappers for malloc() and free().
I couldn't understand that C compilers were so primitive that they forced each developer to give how much memory one wants to allocate.
On the same year (1993), C++ was my escape hatch from C pain with a bit of Pascal safety back, since Turbo Pascal was stuck in PC world and everyone was ignoring the new Extended Pascal standard.
The problem with Pascal was that it didn't have strongholds like C/C++. It was a good (better) general purpose language than C or C++ but then you needed inline ASM for more things as it didn't allow for pointer arithmetic. Borland dominating Pascal practice rather than any standards didn't help either, it just didn't translate well. When Borland withered it took Pascal/Delphi with it.
At the end of the day success is attained in a market. This is basically a messy evolutionary system that is far from perfect and leaves a lot of noisy vestiges in its path, along with unjustly sacrificed unsung heroes. Look at Java, C++, the mobile platforms, etc. What a fucking mess. But it is the way it is.
You could do pointer arithmetic in Turbo Pascal, but I agree with your overall description.
That is why I eventually moved to C++ back then, it might have some warts, but feels way better than C in terms of safety and modular programming support.
Nowadays I spend most of my time in JVM and .NET worlds.
You could hardly do anything in standard Pascal, that is why we were all using dialects and Extend Pascal was produced.
> You willingly spend your time in JVM world? ;-)
Of course. When it appeared it was a good alternative to a dying Pascal eco-system and the chaotic world that was C and C++ compilers trying to catch up with the standards.
Now Oracle is recognizing that Sun made JNI hard on purpose and Java 9/10 are looking good with the missing features to be more hardware friendly.
Anyway, on my line of work customers get to say what they want on their IT stack and that has been Java and .NET since around 2005 (on our case).
