Many languages of the 60's and 70's were horribly over-specified and the "full language" in fact had a lot of features that were not desirable. Some of these were developed at schools as local products that were never released, and others did become products with a life outside the school. Others were developed by minicomputer companies because the "full mainframe language" was not practicable on the mini. e.g. WATFIV was like FORTRAN but eliminated the separate complie/link/execute phases and could collapse them. It extended the language in some directions while collapsing it in others. Later on came RATFOR which went in a different direction, adding structured elements onto FORTRAN. e.g. BASIC was supposed to be a simplified version of FORTRAN or ALGOL, but in fact it was simplified even further into things like PILOT. e.g. COBOL is, even today, cantankerous but some concepts from it went into the much streamlined DIBOL. (I hava a sweet spot for DIBOL.) I think a very important concept, is that having more features in a language, especially when those features were specified by a committee, results in an overly complicated overly large cantankerous language. Too bad most people still get sold on features :-(. It's like the DVD players with 141 buttons on the remote - people buy it because it has more buttons or functions, to the point where putting more buttons on becomes a marketing function, not a usability function. Tim.