You're probably remembering something from Brian Kernighan's 1981 essay, "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language". Lack of unsafe typecasts, as wel

You're probably remembering something from Brian Kernighan's 1981 essay, "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language". Lack of unsafe typecasts, as well as (I think) all of Kernighan's other main points in that essay were cured in Pascal implementations by end of the 80's. But by that time C had captured all the mindshare.