modula

I think the Modula series is the most misunderstood programming language.

Standard Pascal did not have such a thing (Borland Pascal had and was more successful as any other Pascal), Modula 2 -- a superior language at its time, did not have it (the library that was standard for Modula 2, was just to clunky for wide usage) and also other languages did not have it.

It's worth noting there are a few Modula-2 fans about still poking at things, such as the Modula-2 R10[6] effort.

D, Modula-3 and the Oberon family are two examples of value types by default with a GC enabled heap.

Sadly HP/Compaq killed the Olivetti/Digital unit and Modula-3 died, but its ideas can still be applied in modern languages, assuming similar capabilities.

However there were systems programming languages with GC, like Cedar, Oberon and Modula-3.

Modula-3, Eiffel, Oberon, Oberon-2, Component Pascal all offer the same data access patterns and packing available to C and C++.

Both Pascal (including the moderately comercially successful HiSoft Pascal), Modula-II and Oberon.

After the first visit when we learned about Mesa, we designed Modula-2 and its OS Lillith.

They improved Pascal to make modular software in the form of Modula-2.

Check Niklaus Wirth work on Modula-2 and Oberon, and its respective OS.

Modula-2 was born in 1978, but we can go back to Algol and Lisp even.

Yes, but in a language like Modula-3 you can have your "well-tuned systems-level program that uses stack, arena, and heap allocation with a good allocator", and still have a GC at your disposal.

And sometimes, I might be in a different mood, and I'll think "wait, I'll make a statically-typed, AOT version of Python that I can use as a systems programming language instead of C/C++", and I end up mentally re-creating Nim, even to the point of going "well, I'll borrow the static typing part from Modula-3 because Modula-3 is cool and Python has a lot of Modula-3 in it already...", which is basically what Nim did.

It's worth noting there are a few Modula-2 fans about still poking at things, such as the Modula-2 R10[6] effort.

D, Modula-3 and the Oberon family are two examples of value types by default with a GC enabled heap.

Sadly HP/Compaq killed the Olivetti/Digital unit and Modula-3 died, but its ideas can still be applied in modern languages, assuming similar capabilities.