I'd really disagree. All those languages are both safer and more expressive (if more verbose in the case of those with Pascal-like syntax) than any version of C

I'd really disagree. All those languages are both safer and more expressive (if more verbose in the case of those with Pascal-like syntax) than any version of C, and, except in the case of ML, Scheme and ALGOL 68 with the optional garbage collection, there's no reason they couldn't be as fast or faster than C. Their main fault was simply in being too ahead of their time: too difficult or impossible to implement well on a PDP-11. (I deleted the part about FORTRAN 77; seems I was confusing it with F90, which is the version that first allowed identifiers longer than 6 characters, dynamic memory allocation and user-defined types).