Yes, yes, yes! C was a HUGE step backward. And also how I paid the rent in the 90s. ANSI C had the advantage of being portable, though. Even if C, and especially C++, tended to be somewhat deadly.
Turbo Pascal was about 90% of the speed of C with 30 to 50% of the bugs. And yes, I could use pointers and pointer arithmetic in TP if I wanted to bypass array bounds checking, but I had the choice when I needed to do so. Memory management is a lot easier with Pascal functions (and I assume Module/Oberon) than C as well, since the caller allocates the return value. Alternately, you can pass (always non null) values by reference instead of having to use (maybe null) pointers.
Turbo Pascal was about 90% of the speed of C with 30 to 50% of the bugs. And yes, I could use pointers and pointer arithmetic in TP if I wanted to bypass array bounds checking, but I had the choice when I needed to do so. Memory management is a lot easier with Pascal functions (and I assume Module/Oberon) than C as well, since the caller allocates the return value. Alternately, you can pass (always non null) values by reference instead of having to use (maybe null) pointers.