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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

Another advantage of Pascal is that the programs written in it crashed much less, which also allowed for a much safe development on the machines of that time which didn't have any "memory write" protections. And safety in development actually translated in less crashy product too.

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Pascal is very much like a managed language but without GC or borrow checker. It's not formally memory-safe, but its syntax discourages a developer from playing with fire unless it's really needed.

Additionally all the flaws regarding it being designed for teaching and the raise of dialects, were already fixed by 1978 with Modula-2, which Niklaus Wirth than created, with the learnings from Mesa at Xerox PARC.

Later, we also got the managed language genealogy, via Modula-2+ branch, and Niklaus Wirth own Oberon variants, or inspired dialects from it.

Nowadays GCC has Ada, Modula-2 and Algol 68 as official frontend, we have Free Pascal and Delphi.

Then we also have all the other modern ones that somehow got some inspiration out this history.

Thus we as an industry aren't lacking alternatives.

Modula-2 is the road not taken for me. It's such a pity that language didn't get the chance that it deserved.

It sorta did as Ada, tho Ada is a much bigger language than M2 (or Pascal)[1]. There was at least one Ada-83 compiler for DOS (Janus), but it was a tight fit and a miserable experience. To me, the missed opportunity was Modula-3; much of what was nifty about Ada (and other things) in a smaller package.

[1] People often forget how compact a language Pascal (and somewhat M2) is. It comfortable self-hosts on 8-bit machines with a few dozen K (not M) of memory. It does an OK job even on the 6502 (admittedly, p-code). There was even a cross compiler for the 8051.

I think that D and C# are the right descendents to Modula-3, and many aren't still unaware of how much C# has improved for low level programming tasks.

Unfortunely its adoption window has passed by, although there is a guy keeping it going on Github, from the official Critical Mass compiler that once existed,

https://github.com/modula3/cm3

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