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Pascal dialects, Modula-2 are of a similar age, while other like JOVIAL are a decade older but they did not come with a very big killer feature, an OS like UNIX.

Then there were BLISS, Mesa and PL/I, but the OSes that made use of them lost to UNIX, so.

With exception of Mac OS, written in Object Pascal and later ported to a mix of Object Pascal and C++.

Having said this, plenty of alternatives with AOT compilers exist nowadays.

The only thing C has going for it, is historical weight, UNIX/POSIX ecosystem, and some domains that are closed to any alternative suggestions, due to tooling or cargo cult against alternatives.



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