All Pascal dialects, and the Extended Pascal standard that improved the original one, had the array of <type> construct that allows you to query for the actual bounds.
Type conversations were also available, again in all dialects.
Naturally, those variants were ignored, as Kernighan had a message to sell.
And, all Pascal dialects had some construct. They had different constructs. If you wanted to be portable, you couldn't use any of them (until the Extended standard came out). Kernighan notes those extensions, but does not accept them as a solution because of their non-portability. You may think that he is more dismissive than he should be here, but at that time, C was considerably better on code portability.
And when you say that Kernighan was acting as a propagandist, I wonder whether you are being one. You certainly seem to have a message to sell when it comes to Pascal vs C...
Kernighan wrote that paper after writing "Software Tools In Pascal", and finding it considerably harder than it should have been to write that kind of thing in Pascal. (The predecessor book, "Software Tools", was written in RATFOR, and Pascal should have been miles better to write software in.)
In this book, they (Kernighan and Plaugher) tried to write code that would work in Pascal, not just in one dialect of it. That is, portability was essential to the code they were writing for the book. That may have lead to a greater emphasis on portability in Kernighan's paper than one might think warranted by the general situation.
Nor that Modula-2, designed to fix all those issues with ISO Pascal, was in use since 1978.
Yeah, whatever.
Implementations for x86 had a mess of different pointer types, but to build the same program for a non-crippled CPU you could #define the extra keywords to the empty string.
Those variants were "ignored" because they largely didn't exist. Kernighan's essay was written in 1981. The first release of Turbo Pascal wasn't until 1983. The Extended Pascal standard wasn't released until 1990.
https://vintageapple.org/apple_ii/pdf/Apple_Pascal_1980.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/vax/lang/pascal/AA-H485A-TE...
Look in the acknowledgement section of his essay, and no clarification is given to the extent of research on other variants of Pascal outside of the original Pascal of 1973, and references to documents such as "An Assessment of the Programming Language Pascal" of 1975, and "Pascal User Manual and Report" of 1978. Those documents were ISO/IEEE related, to help promote an ISO standard of Pascal, versus businesses using Pascal in the commercial space like Apple and DEC (later Compaq) were doing (both major companies).
Further damning of the type of assessment that Kernighan was engaging in, was him referencing other AT&T Bell Lab comparisons between C and Pascal.
AT&T is not an innocent 3rd party, but where C and C++ were created and having a huge interest in pushing those languages, along with Unix in business and universities (which they did).
Kernighan's essay (on 1970s era Pascal), should have been seen as biased and influenced by or promoting the commercial interests of AT&T (promoting their C and Unix). It should not have been taken seriously by anyone beyond 1989, where Pascal became Object Pascal. Apple created Object Pascal in 1986 (in consultation with Niklaus Wirth), and then Borland added Object Pascal extensions to the very successful Turbo Pascal 5.5 (allowing it to do OOP too). Nearly everything in his paper was clearly and already addressed by 1989 and even various ones when he published it in 1981.
Kernighan also had plenty of time to retract or update the statements he made in his "hit piece" paper, to reflect on the ISO 1990 Pascal or the commercially used variants of Pascal such as Object Pascal. Yet, he never did so. Comparatively, it's not like C or C++ stayed the same language as it was in the 1970s, so it shouldn't be expected that Pascal is suppose to not change.
And then there is the detail that Modula-2 was released in 1978, exactly with the goal to fix all original Pascal issues for systems programming.
If there had been enough demand to also do a Modula version of the book, he might have written a more favorable article about Modula afterwards.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.12/Ob...
