[DanielStraight]

There is some really good stuff in here, but there is one point on which I totally disagree: operator overloading.

Operator overloading can be abused, yes, but there are many things which don't belong in a standard library and nevertheless lend themselves to adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.

See: Growing a Language, by Guy Steele http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415...

[KirkWylie]

The problem that I've always found with it is that I've seen it so horribly abused that I'm just not sure that there's a reasonable subset that you can nail down that won't just cause more problems than it's worth. In the hands of skilled developers, you can solve some really elegant problems with operator overloading. In the hands of someone who isn't as good as they think they are, or is more clever than they should be, it's just too prone to making common statements not do what they seem to do, which is part of the unambiguous syntax part.