I found that in Modula-2 and Oberon, however times have changed.
For me the best version of Oberon linage is Active Oberon, while I appreciate Wirth I think he went too far on his quest for language simplification. Even Go has more features than Oberon
-07.
As for Modula-2, it is now a standard language on GCC, otherwise Zig and Odin are relatively similar for the curly bracket folks.
I found Modula-2 to be annoying to use, not for any deep reason, but because of its use of block capitals for keywords, and a confusing nomenclature for casting. It does actually matter that a language is comfortable to write.
Keywords were never an issue to me, because I love tools, and most proper Modula-2 IDEs supported automatic formatting, just like I write SQL in lower case and let my tools work for me.
People should stop designing languages for notepad and classical UNIX V6 vi as editor experience.
Casts well, each language has its own nomenclature for type conversions.
That is true now, but remember how far back this was. I was programming Modula-2 on CP/M - our lab standardised on the Amstrad 8512 for control / data acquisition for cost reasons. Early PCs existed, running MS/DOS, so you could probably get Micro-Emacs - I don't remember when that came out. I remember seeing one Sun 3, but they were not common equipment. This was at Oxford. So in brief, it didn't work well with the operating systems of the period.
Can you fix that problem now? Yes, but the window for Modula-2 closed decades back. It doesn't have any significant selling points now.
I think Wirth said something like "I am a programmer who is a professor, and a professor who is a programmer." Definitely a huge inspiration to me, both for the elegance and compactness of his system designs as well as the idea that research could and should affect practice, and vice-versa.
At least with -fbounds-safety clang is finally catching up with what Pascal (including UCSD, Apple, and Turbo Pascal) and Ada (a rather more complicated descendant of Pascal) compilers had in the 1980s. (Delphi and Free Pascal still have range checking today.)
