[PopsiclePete]

Have to disagree with you there. Windows is older than COM. It's actually older than C++. The classic core Windows libraries and interfaces like GDI are plain old C. Not even a hint of C++.

COM is language agnostic. You can consume COM servers in Delphi that have been written in VB. Again, no C++, not necessarily. The only "true" C++ API I'm aware of is GDI+. Everything else to my knowledge was and is either straight C or COM.

[vibrolax]

And I have to disagree with one of your statements a little bit:

"The classic core Windows libraries and interfaces like GDI are plain old C."

__cdecl: this is the native C calling convention Calling function pops the arguments from the stack.

__stdcall: this is the standard Win32 library interface Called function pops its own arguments from the stack.

Calling conventions explained here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/k2b2ssfy.aspx