> Pascal, which had sized strings, was in wide use before C. Many people, including Bill Atkinson, who wrote many of the original Macintosh applications, thought C was a step backwards.

Sure, but parent wasn't saying "it was not possible", they said "It was too expensive".

And sure enough, the market drifted to the cheaper solution: you could run slightly more applications if your OS and applications were all written in C than if they were written in Pascal, Modula, etc.