People keep playing this tired song, while clearly ignoring that until ISO C89, even C was full of dialects, a mix of K&R C and whatever the compiler writer felt like, filled with tons of Assembly.

Small-C, RatC,....

Additionally forgetting that Modula-2 came out in 1978, as means the sort out all those issues, a language designed for systems programming, instead of the "Python" from 1970, designed for teaching.

With features that C is yet to have, 50 years later, while HN is hypping for having them in a C like syntax delivered in a Zig package.

I know that paper and personally I think some of the critiques are actually qualities of pascal, making it, while certainly not a completely refined language, a more modern language than C

- no escape (AKA no casting): good!

- no default clause in case: good idea, not so good implementation (undefined behaviour)

- no break outside for loops: inconvenient, but that's how FP works. it is still debated today if breaking loops is considered a good or a bad practice

- no separated compilation: I will quote Kernighan on this Theoretically, there is no need for separate compilation - if one's compiler is very fast Pascal compiler was fast, maybe not very fast, but speed was one of the primary goals for Wirth.

many other issues were similar in other languages and in C

Pascal had obviously its faults, but every language back then had some

Pascal was simple enough to make it easy to compile and implement. That's what Wirth thaught, he's the author of Compiler Construction after all, it wasn't like learning Python today as a data scientist

make the language more complex (and more useful/interesting) and you're stuck with a very slow or very buggy compiler that very few people would know how to implement

I think there's a reason why we had Turbo Pascal and not Turbo Algol 68