In the original Pascal, that was true. The standard (and, I think, Jensen & Wirth) were that way. And it was a fatal flaw.
I had a program that I took over that did a numerical simulation on a 2D grid with user-specified size. The original author simulated that 2D grid with a 1D doubly-linked list. As you might expect, this was both slow and error-prone. But he did it because there was no possible type that you could give to a user-sized array. There was literally no way to talk about such a thing.
We eventually "fixed" it by allocating the largest 2D array possible within our memory limitations, and using only the user-specified part of it.
Most "real" Pascals (Turbo Pascal, but others that were intended to be used in the real world, not just in the classroom) developed some way to give a type to a variable-length array (and also to do a C-ish cast). Unfortunately they all did it in different ways, so there was no code portability between compilers if your code needed such things.
So, yeah, "objectively better than C" is quite a stretch, even just in the type system.
I had a program that I took over that did a numerical simulation on a 2D grid with user-specified size. The original author simulated that 2D grid with a 1D doubly-linked list. As you might expect, this was both slow and error-prone. But he did it because there was no possible type that you could give to a user-sized array. There was literally no way to talk about such a thing.
We eventually "fixed" it by allocating the largest 2D array possible within our memory limitations, and using only the user-specified part of it.
Most "real" Pascals (Turbo Pascal, but others that were intended to be used in the real world, not just in the classroom) developed some way to give a type to a variable-length array (and also to do a C-ish cast). Unfortunately they all did it in different ways, so there was no code portability between compilers if your code needed such things.
So, yeah, "objectively better than C" is quite a stretch, even just in the type system.