Hmmm, to be in a position where you want to start learning a language? That seems a very long time ago for me and was a mixture of brand new command line operating systems, front panel programming, BASIC interpreters, peeking and poking machine code into blocks of memory and then PASCAL. If I had my choice again, and from where I'am now I would learn C#, I've played around with it, don't use it and feel hemmed in by its formalised constructs, however you can do so much with it and it keeps you on the straight and narrow. Its where the big M is investing lots of its development money so climb on board that band wagon, I don't think you'll get frustrated by its limitations as we all did with languages in the early days. The true breadth of a language like C++ or C# is limited only by your imagination and your determination to understand someone else's code libraries. I have to admit to agreeing to some of the other comments, if you truly are starting from scratch its not a language you need to learn but a formal design methodology, use the language to exercise the method. for me its C and C++ all the way, there are only languages in the image of these two incredibly flexible build tools. @