Modula2 is Nicholas Wirth?'s attempt to do a SystemsProgrammingLanguage? right. Nicholas Wirth also wrote Pascal, Modula-2 is it's more serious successor. It's safer than C, it prevents most buffer overruns; though it feels more pedantic, you must code all type conversions explicitly and TYPE all KEYWORDS in CAPITAL LETTERS. Some WLUGer fondly remembers it like this:

...a very fascist language they forced us to learn at CanterburyUniversity. It has very strict typing rules, but it does teach you structured programming, I suppose.

Modula2 is good, but not used much anymore. Modula2 lost out to C and TurboPascal in a popularity race in the early 80's. TurboPascal had a very good, cheap compiler in DOS systems, and quickly evolved into a very similar language. C was just there already on Unix systems, and Modula-2 lacked anything like C's preprocessor.