As an historical note, Pascal was very popular in the late 70s and 80s for systems programming. The entire Apple Lisa/Macintosh platform started out in Pascal,

As an historical note, Pascal was very popular in the late 70s and 80s for systems programming. The entire Apple Lisa/Macintosh platform started out in Pascal, for example. The limits of Pascal led Apple to team up with Wirth and develop Object Pascal, which is basically the language Free Pascal implements now. The gap between Pascal with a couple extensions and C, or between Object Pascal and Objective-C, is very small, anyway. Most semantic elements have a one-to-one correspondence. There were even UNIX clones written in Pascal.