[tralarpa]

It's one of the reasons I like Java. People call it a "verbose" language, but it's such a simple language syntax-wise that the IDE knows most of the time exactly what's going on in the editor window. Static typing helps, too, of course.

I remember working with C++ in Visual Studio when that new refactoring plugin became popular (tomatoe something something? later bought by Microsoft) and although the plugin tried its best, it often stopped working with files with a lot of ifdefs and macros.

B removed some features from BCPL that were too expensive to implement. I never understood why they didn't continue that idea in C by applying it to the syntax as well. Wirth knew what he was doing.