Pascal dialects already in the late 80's, early 90's, allowed for:

- type safe sub ranges

- proper strings

- type safe enumerations, enumerations as vector indexes

- type safe allocation (new vs malloc)

- type safe out parameters via references instead of pointers

- bounds checking and checked arithmetic (you can explicit disable them if required for performance)

- real modules via units

- pointer arithmetic is more explicit

As for MicroPython, MikroPascal from MikroElektronika supports all those tiny chips.

http://www.mikroe.com/mikropascal/