> However, almost every short- and medium-term change planned runs counter to that long-term goal. I'm not sure the C++ commitee would agree with you. Every ch

> However, almost every short- and medium-term change planned runs counter to that long-term goal. I'm not sure the C++ commitee would agree with you. Every change adds to the language and hence, in a certain sense, makes things more complex, yes. But the idea is to add simpler alternatives to some current terrible stuff. As for metaclasses, they enable to define some fairly clean "class contracts", i.e. it constraints how some class can be implemented - and will report a clean error message at compile-time if the constraints are breached. Contrast to the current situation where failing to respect such a contract will make your program blow up at runtime or generate a byzantine template error at compile-time.