> three kinds of the same kind of screwdriver, with slightly different lengths Yeah, true. Maybe the better analogy is not the toolbox but the screws, bolts, e

> three kinds of the same kind of screwdriver, with slightly different lengths Yeah, true. Maybe the better analogy is not the toolbox but the screws, bolts, etc. that the tools operate on. I have several sizes of Torx and other exotic screwdrivers which I have never needed ... but I might some day, if some idiot who knows where or when decided that they just had to use that particular screw for something. In large long-lived C++ codebases there always seems to be some asshole who used the equivalent of a MorTorq or Tri-Wing just because it looked cool, so that feature has to be supported forever after. Programmers years later then see this far from self-explanatory code, because these additions always seem to involve using familiar symbols in arbitrary new ways, and have to pore through old versions of the standard to figure out WTF it does. I do think it would be far better if the old screws and the drivers for them were deprecated from time to time.