Wirth's Pascal as described in User Manual and Report is nearly impossible to write non-trivial programs in. I know, I tried. It required a lot of extensions to become usable.

In 1982 or so a friend loaned me his copy of K+R, I read it, and was instantly hooked. Never wrote another line of Pascal. I had written a lot of PDP-11 assembler at the time, and C's PDP-11 heritage made it very easy to pick up C. I saw how the PDP-11's semantics mapped right on to C.

But some good came out of my experience with Pascal. D's nested functions are inspired by Pascal's nested functions. Simple and easy, including the ability to reach back on the stack and access the callers's variables (all the way up to main()).

C should have had nested functions.