The last time around, the committee invented lots of features on the fly, many of which turned out to have far-reaching negative effects. (Think of the books th

The last time around, the committee invented lots of features on the fly, many of which turned out to have far-reaching negative effects. (Think of the books that have been written on subjects like writing exception-safe code.) So I wouldn't lean too hard on "I know the committee thinks of backwards compatibility".