Been there, done that. We were using Pascal (standard Pascal, no Turbo extensions) on a machine with memory mapped I/O. This means that we had to drop into assembly to write to the I/O registers. And that meant that we lost all type checking for those functions. We couldn't even check the number of parameters! Unsurprisingly, that led to a crash.
That is: The extreme safety of Pascal led to a crash (when we had to do something that Pascal, in its wisdom, said we weren't allowed to do).
