C and Pascal are very similar. Both are imperative, procedural, block-structured languages, so they live very close together in the spectrum of computer languages.

However, Pascal was designed to protect the programmer from himself whereas C was designed to give maximum power to the programmer (which may be why it's sometimes referred to as a high-level assembly language).

I think Donald Killen put it very well: "I used to think Pascal was OK--but that was before I discovered C. I never could get used to Pascal's strong typing. I always saw it as too constraining. Training wheels are for kids, to prevent accidents. They have no place in professional software engineering."

Since most embedded developers would opt for power and control over safety, C is the obvious choice for a high-level language for embedded work.

On the other hand, it's way easier to write a Pascal compiler than a C compiler. :-)