Teaching programming h;lp

I'm going to teach programming to somebody who's going to study it more formally in a year, but wants to be learning part of it in the mean time.

What SIMPLE, CLEAN, STRUCTURED language would you recommend me to use for teaching? Please, refrain from language wars as this is not a fanboy thread but a serious question. Before yuo mention it, I'm not going to start with either Python or Ruby because they're too complex and get too much in the way, and no, I'm not stupid enough to start with Java because a radical OO language (and a crappy one at that) with a shitty enterprise API is not the best either.

I'm thinking Pascal. As much as it sucks, it has strict/anal types (it's better to start anal than to start easy-going and botch it), simple yet not messy syntax, simple stdin/stdout input and output to play with (that's all I'll need), and none of the complexity of OO. Yet it sounds so useless. But I don't know of other languages that meet these requirements.

>>25
All operations on strings are O(n)
Oh I call bull on this shit. strlen is O(1). The rest are, of course, at least O(n).

About the cache, how does that affect accessing one dword that's always in the same address (at least as long as you don't resize the string), and not affect reading the whole string till the damned final zero?

Besides, C strings are not just a matter of performance, but functionality. They are not binary safe. Useless for binary data, which is something you're supposed to deal with often in a low-level language such as C. C strings, therefore, fail hard and inflict double damage.

Finally, would you care to explain why, if C strings are so great, every modern language, almost always built on C, offers Pascal-style strings? I can't think of a modern language that goes OMG is that a zero!? End of string lolol.