What about the UNIX and C folks propaganda of C being the first systems language, or always focusing on the original Pascal used for teaching and not everything else that followed up with Mesa, Modula-2, Ada, Object Pascal and friends, none of them with said limitations.
It was a systems programming language and the first well known/successful one.
There was BCPL and then B before that, which is why the language is called "C".
Pascal was considered a teaching language, along with "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" by Wirth etc.
The UCSD P-system was one of the first "IDEs" and used Pascal and a bytecode interpreter of the compiled code.
Modula-2 was barely available in the early 1980s.
Ada was mired in MIL-SPEC and expensive compilers etc.
People used FORTRAN for scientific programming, C for most everything else in the non-IBM mainframe world.
You missed quite a few between JOVIAL, and C being adopted outside Bell Labs.
Modula-2 was as widely available as C was outside UNIX and universities with access to UNIX source code.
It took a while for proper C to actually be "used for everything else", until the early 1990s actually, and by then anyone sensible would be much better with Typescript for C, aka C++.
You mean "C with Classes", later to be replaced by "C++" (Stroustrup pick this as favorite from a list of candidate names he crowdsourced) as implemented by Cfront.
If BCPL begat "B" and "B" begat "C", then "C" should have begatten "P".
Not sure if begatten is a word :)
I had a friend that tried to get everyone using Modula-2 but the "ecosystem" wasn't as great around the uni/ex-uni environments where I was.
C was pretty entrenched by the end of the 1980s, although I did use a weird embedded Pascal that was on HP-UX cross-compiling for Z80/8086 at the end of the decade, but they were the exception rather than the rule.
C++ was just a preprocessor for C and a "better C" at the time, people were still bitching about header files with function type signatures of "ANSI C" vs "good old-fashioned K&R".
We also tied onions to our belts...
Anyway on VMS most folks would be found using the VMS BASIC compiler, VMS Pascal or Bliss, until Open VMS made it yet another UNIX clone.
My first C compiler used the RatC dialect, let alone having access to a proper K&R C compiler.
By 1992, I already had access to a proper C++ compiler on MS-DOS, and C was history to me, other than scenarios were work was expected to be done in C like some university assignments, even here we were blessed with a plethora of languages between Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk, ML, C, C++,....
And maybe it was 5/10 years earlier? Not sure. My uni days were the very early 1980s. Our university literally still made 1st years use marked sense (not even punch) cards.
I never ever liked C++, it always seemed to be tacked on to the side of C (literally at the start).
I liked the "better C" bits, but the "++" bits and the magic under the covers and then later the added layer of templates just seemed ridiculously complicated especially because we were still in the days of inheritance and "is-a" instead of "has-a" objects.
I loathed all the overloading that suddenly << meant something completely different when doing I/O and weird multiple function definitions to provide the generics.
Much preferred the Objective C idea of messages, was much more what I understood OOP to be after Smalltalk.
But by then I'd made the leap to being an "architect" and got to pontificate from on high and languages became semi-irrelevant.