Turbo Pascal (from early versions) could very much handle individual bytes (and IIRC, had bit manipulation primitives like bitwise and/or/xor/not, shr, shl, etc

Turbo Pascal (from early versions) could very much handle individual bytes (and IIRC, had bit manipulation primitives like bitwise and/or/xor/not, shr, shl, etc.), and could even address memory at fixed locations, such as the video memory on the IBM PC (and segment:offset x86 memory at that). Don't know about other Pascal implementations, such as the others pjmlp has mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but would not be surprised if some of them could as well. I agree with pjmlp's statement (again, elsewhere in this thread), that C is probably being compared (to C's advantage) against early standard Pascal (which was a limited, academic language), not the commercial implementations which would have been / were more pragmatic. And I say this as a guy who liked and used both Turbo Pascal and C (C on DOS, Unix and Windows) a lot, for long, earlier, including being team lead for a successful Windows C database middleware product.