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.

>>58
Hardly status dropping, mate. I was merely making obvious that my background isn't a "toy" language. It's C.

because a pointer to the middle of a zero-terminated string is exactly as good a string as any other.
A valid argument. However, if the language supports length-prefix strings, this doesn't hold. Have a look at how D does it (ignore the C++ bit): http://www.digitalmars.com/d/cppstrings.html

Just because you can do some things nicely doesn't mean it's a good general policy. Hark back to the ever-popular example of goto.