Pascal, the dialects most people used, not the ISO Pascal from 1972 used by Kernighan, had ways to pass around dynamically size arrays and strings.

Which anyway was not an issue in the PL/I variants that predated C, nor the Mesa/Modula-2 descendents from the mid-70's.

EDIT:

Walter's example with 1978's Modula-2.

    MODULE Example;

    FROM InOut IMPORT WriteString, Write, WriteLn;

    PROCEDURE get(buffer : ARRAY OF CHAR): CHAR;
    BEGIN
      RETURN buffer[10]; (* This will boom unless compiled with bounds checking disabled, in which case who knows *)
    END get;

    VAR
      buffer : ARRAY [0..9] OF CHAR;

    BEGIN
        WriteString('The out of bounds character is');
        Write(get(buffer));
        WriteLn;
    END Example.