My impression from my limited experience with Pascal (more recently only playing around a bit with Free Pascal) is that much of the basic parts of the language,

My impression from my limited experience with Pascal (more recently only playing around a bit with Free Pascal) is that much of the basic parts of the language, that a beginner like me is mostly exposed to, is very safe with strong typing and range-checking on all arrays. I do not know how far you can get in practical programming while sticking to those parts of the language, or how unsafe it gets once you start playing with pointers? I think the pointers are supposed to at least be safer than in C, unless you go out of your way to break things?