> To complete the list of things that C might provide but doesn't: It has no storage management, like Pascal's new function

Pascal is essentially just the abandoned prototype for more grown-up designs like Modula-2.

The Modula-2 language an allocation mechanism more similar to malloc and free. And, actually, early versions of that were broken: there was a way to ask how much memory remains before trying the memory allocation request, with no way to know whether it succeeded.

Guess what? This was fixed in the ISO standard.

See here, the ISO function reference on modula2.org:

http://modula2.org/reference/isomodules/isomodule.php?file=S...

  PROCEDURE ALLOCATE (VAR addr: SYSTEM.ADDRESS; amount: CARDINAL);
    (* Allocates storage for a variable of size amount and assigns the address of this
       variable to addr. If there is insufficient unallocated storage to do this, the
       value NIL is assigned to addr.
    *)

So ISO Modula 2 has an allocator that pretty much exactly like malloc and free. (It's worse: DEALLOCATE needs to know the size!)

If Pascal's way was better, it would have survived into Modula-2.

Also, Modula-2 has I/O functions that you try first, and then check the result. Streams are called "channels":

  PROCEDURE ReadRestLine (cid: IOChan.ChanId; VAR s: ARRAY OF CHAR);
    (* Removes any remaining characters from the input stream cid before the next line mark,
       copying to s as many as can be accommodated as a string value. The read result is set
       to the value allRight, outOfRange, endOfLine, or endOfInput.
    *)

More like C, again. None of this business of knowing whether we are at end-of-file or end-of-line without trying any input.