A random comment won't qualify as high-quality but I have a fond relationship with Pascal, since I learnt programming with a Turbo Pascal book that was on the s

A random comment won't qualify as high-quality but I have a fond relationship with Pascal, since I learnt programming with a Turbo Pascal book that was on the shelf in my local library and since Turbo Pascal gave weird error messages (due to clock speeds as it turns out), I found Freepascal that I could get from the internet via dial-up connection. FreePascal's Object Pascal is is a nice language, pascal alone gives you an environment similar to C, with Object Pascal you get some polymorphism (classes and methods). What's of course missing in comparison to C++ is templates, so as soon as you build containers you will find yourself casting again. If you want to have a slightly-more-high-level language than C, it may work out. Especially the Unit-System allows for better modularisation and definitely is an improvement over include-headers. For most applications nowadays I would like to have a GC in place, which kind of makes me wonder whether Modula/oberon would be the more natural choices nowadays for choosing a pascal-esque language. But then I quickly end up picking SML/ocaml because once you have a GC, you quickly want a couple of other niceties unless you really want to have a bare-metal language.