alt Hacker NewsAll those limitations were sorted out in 1978 with Modula-2 and open arrays, aka spans.
What about the UNIX and C folks propaganda of C being the first systems language, or always focusing on the original Pascal used for teaching and not everything else that followed up with Mesa, Modula-2, Ada, Object Pascal and friends, none of them with said limitations.
C was specifically developed to allow Unix to be ported.
It was a systems programming language and the first well known/successful one.
There was BCPL and then B before that, which is why the language is called "C".
Pascal was considered a teaching language, along with "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" by Wirth etc.
The UCSD P-system was one of the first "IDEs" and used Pascal and a bytecode interpreter of the compiled code.
Modula-2 was barely available in the early 1980s.
Ada was mired in MIL-SPEC and expensive compilers etc.
People used FORTRAN for scientific programming, C for most everything else in the non-IBM mainframe world.