Interesting example of PL progress. I would have said that free-style templates were part of the "C++ way", in fact fairly close to its essence. One feature wh

Interesting example of PL progress. I would have said that free-style templates were part of the "C++ way", in fact fairly close to its essence. One feature which seems to lie along the axis of forward progress is lambdas (even Java got them) and one that appears to lie in its past is unstructured control flow (IMO this is somewhat regrettable). One thing I wish languages would all evolve is an expression-language syntax but there was and is a surprising amount of kvetching about Rust's "implicit returns" so perhaps I'll be waiting a while longer for that. OTOH, the idea of forward evolution is also deceptive. The imperative world had tagged unions many decades ago, but they were abandoned in the OOP craze in favor of forms of subtyping (the Modula-3 designers at least gave this justification as a form of pure progress) and it's only fairly recently that they have percolated back over from the functional world and OOP-style subtyping has fallen from grace.