> The first C++ compilers were just preprocessors that translated into > pure C code ...
I agree with this. > the C code was reasonably clear, not really convoluted, so you would have > been able to write it yourself. I disagree with this. My sense of C is that IF you are relying on preprocessors to do sophisticated things, THEN you are not writing clear C code. The implementations I've seen of polymorphism-of-structs in C are quite ugly to my eyes, and make me grateful C++ was invented. OTOH, I've seen object-based C development projects (I.e. where you could tell what function was being called at compile time) that are quite readable. It requires coding discipline (as does readability in any language). We might just be arguing over the definition of "readable" here. I have been told that my standards of readable are unreasonable, so perhaps I'm in the wrong here. That said, I'm just glad true OO languages exist, especially Python. All hail Guido. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
