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.

>>37
Oh, of course. Note that, even though I was talking about C strings, I believe I was differentiating characters from bytes in my proposal and said the maximum number of characters is (length >> 1) - 1 or something like that, and using wchar_t, too lazy to check. (This is also an approximation, as we're using UTF-16 and not taking surrogate pairs in consideration.)

There's somewhat of a vague implementation of Unicode in C99 with wchar_t and the wcs* series of functions, even if it's so poorly and vaguely defined in the standard it's not too clear what the heck does this do. The C standard is really shitty there; instead of fully adopting and embracing Unicode UTF-16 and including a proper library and Unicode metainformation, they come up with vague "wide characters" and multibyte shit.


>>38-40
Thanks for the useful comments, I'll consider all you mentioned. Except Java :p . As for electronics, I won't get that far, but I sure will attempt to give him a rough idea of how it's all done with logic gates, for example with the logic for a simple 4 bit register.