I'd start with most of the best parts of Delphi/Free Pascal

Insanely fast recursive descent single pass compilation.

Assignment and equality test have different tokens := vs =

Var parameters instead of messing with pointers

Functions return values, procedures don't

Strings that are automatically reference counted (no allocation or garbage collection to worry about), counted (so you always know how many bytes of text you have), and just work, yet can hold at least a gigabyte

Units for separate compilation

Strong typing

Then I'd add some things from elsewhere

pre and post increment/decrement from C

declarative programming, using a "magical assignment operator" <<==<< or something like that to indicate that the left is always made to equal the expression on the right, and updated any time the expression changes. -- from an experiment called Metamine that was here a few years ago