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).
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.