Modula 2 is much like C in it's close-to-the-metal performance abilities. On the downside, if you want to call it that, is a more prominent syntax (keywords in

Modula 2 is much like C in it's close-to-the-metal performance abilities. On the downside, if you want to call it that, is a more prominent syntax (keywords instead of curlies, upper-case keywords, etc). On the upside it lacks any unsafe operations, except for dealloc. In addition, it has actual modules in lieu of includes, hence it's blazingly fast to compile and/or recompile. It'a a pity it didn't catch on, the language lacked a company to back and promote it. AT&T promoted C, Apple promoted Objective C, Microsoft promoted VB...