Apparently the Ariane 5 firmware was written in ADA which I believe was developed for the American military to address the type of issues you cite.

In my opinion there is no substitute for having a proper understanding of the tools you are using - relying on the language to prevent mistakes just leads to sloppy coding. I use 'C' for practically everything for a number of reasons, but high on the list is the fact that I know 'C' very well. I can therefore produce reliable code quickly. Almost all the 'undocumented features' I include in projects these days are algorithmic errors rather than language errors.

I'll bet that if I tried to write any non-trivial ADA code it would fail dismally (if I ever got it to compile)!