Really any ALGOL 60 (68?) descendant would have the same speed potential. It would only be a compiler matter. C, Pascal, Ada, teoretically can achieve same speed.
I'm sorry, I disagree. As a specific example, a language which relies heavily on termination code at the end of every block to unwind temporary allocations and exception handlers will always be slower than one that doesn't provide that facility, and that is generally made worse if separate compilation prevents that from being optimised away (due to callbacks expecting the same stack layout).
Apart from that, just about everything is derived from ALGOL these days. Classic FORTRAN and COBOL have (thankfully) withered as have environments such as Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk and Forth, and their descendants are quick to point out how much they've borrowed from ALGOL/Pascal/Ada: control blocks, data structures and the rest. But some of those descendants couldn't be implemented without heavy use of either reference counting or garbage collection, and again those are inherent time-wasters.
In certain (broad) way, C<->Pascal translation is nearly automatic.
And even i would say that pascal should do even better speed because compiler has more information (strong typed, and things like that).
On the other hand, it's difficult today thinking in a big app made with only one languaje. OS (platform) are in Cs* and even same compiler with same languaje (even C) could perform different from one OS to another...
I've had people in the past trying to convince me that UNIX-based systems could /only/ be programmed in C.
MarkMLl