I agree: There were several successful Pascal systems that (a) pretty much had the commercial market for such languages saturated and (b) had pragmatic solution

I agree: There were several successful Pascal systems that (a) pretty much had the commercial market for such languages saturated and (b) had pragmatic solutions for areas such as I/O. I/O in the original Pascal definition was particularly unfortunate in that it both needed ad-hoc mechanisms and was not particularly expressive. Modula-2 improved on this by being capable of doing I/O without ad hoc mechanisms, but it was still not very expressive. But if you bought into the more purist Wirth vision, and especially if you tried to use the language as officially defined, Modula-2 was a much nicer language than Pascal.