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Comment by anta40 | Hacker News Reader

Say to strictly enforce modularity, e.g helper functions that can only be accessed within its function.

Pascal supports it (at least Turbo Pascal, no idea about ISO Pascal).

For a counterpoint, see David R. Hanson's "Is block structure necessary?" (1981) [0] — back in those days, "block structure" meant nested routines with nested scopes — which argues that having instead a proper module system, with explicit control over what's being exported from a module, not only gives a better modularity, decomposition, and encapsulation, but also simplifies both the language's implementation, and the run-time structures it needs (remember displays, and the hardware support for them e.g. x86's ENTER?).

    Block structure is traditionally considered an a priori requirement for algorithmic program-
    ming languages. Most new languages since Algol-60 have block structure. Reasons exist,
    however, to omit the general form of block structure — nested procedure definitions in which
    references to identifiers defined in outer procedures are permitted — from programming
    languages, especially those intended for systems programming applications. This paper
    reviews the concept of block structure and considers its advantages and disadvantages. It
    concludes that, in many cases, a module facility is superior to block structure and should be
    considered in lieu of block structure in future languages.

[0] https://drh.github.io/documents/blockstructure.pdf

The traditional way of doing this in C is simply static functions. Every .c file has exactly one non-static function and all the other helper functions are static.

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