It used to be a genuine item of concern in X3J3 (FORTRAN), and, for all I know, other X3 standards committees, whether the role of the committee was to certify and clarify existing practice or to extend the language. Fortunately, a lot of people back in the days of F77 remembered what a nightmare PL/I turned out to be. By the time of F90 (was supposed to have been F88), that had been largely forgotten. That awful word "deprecated" seems to spell doom for a language, as in "EXAMINE is deprecated; we're going to give you a new verb, INSPECT, with about fifty jillion new options that you'll never remember anyway." COBOL was never the same after that. It always seemed to me that the C++ people never even had the discussion. For what it's worth, I do use C++ for some projects, but it's generally at the level that C++ was when C++ was pretty much a standalone preprocessor for a C compiler. Cheers, Chuck