C++ is ugly, complex and highly unreliable compared to earlier programming media. I've been at this since 1960 and, as the practice became more user (i.e. engineer) friendly, the "professional" programmers saw the handwriting on the wall. Our purpose, as program designers and developers, was to put ourselves out of business. The computer science community, however, chose to establish a continuing need for their services by morphing assembly language into a syntax-laden barrier between the user and the computer: C, then C++. Believe me, there were plenty of other, more utilitarian, alternatives available to FORTRAN and COBOL. To give the devil his due, Bjarne did make the world safe for professional programmers - and held back the development of computer applications by decades. Peter McLaughlin The Simulation and Modelling Workshop