Yeah, the benefits of strong typing have nothing to do with Pascal...
Sigh. Kids nowadays, etc. Look up which was the original language ridiculed for its "belt-and-braces" approach to type safety, in contrast to C, the freewheeling language of Kewl H4xx0rs (although they weren't yet spelled that way).
Now excuse me, there's a cloud I have to go shake my fist at.
I genuinely didn't realize Pascal was recognized as providing having a strong type system. I guess there is Brian Kernighan's "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language," where he complains that there's "no escape" to the type system as in C, where anything can be cast to anything. But I took it to mean that C just had an exceptionally loose and liberal type system.
Yah you have to think about this in the context of really bad C code from the 1990s.
It was really common for people to stuff pointers in ints and ints in pointers and do all kinds of really abusive things with the memory system in C. It was all fun and games until the program died with nary a stack trace. (Stack traces were pretty amazing the first time I saw them!)
There were even big commercial libraries that did really odd stuff. Motif (big early Unix UI framework) did a lot of weird stuff.
Pascal was pretty straightforward and disciplined compared to that, although I'm sure developers who were too clever for their own good found ways to do silly things.
Sigh. Kids nowadays, etc. Look up which was the original language ridiculed for its "belt-and-braces" approach to type safety, in contrast to C, the freewheeling language of Kewl H4xx0rs (although they weren't yet spelled that way).
Now excuse me, there's a cloud I have to go shake my fist at.