> Nobody can agree on what those common things are in a general purpose langusge though. Well, then take the Lazarus / Free Pascal's approach and just put ever

> Nobody can agree on what those common things are in a general purpose langusge though. Well, then take the Lazarus / Free Pascal's approach and just put everything :-P. It isn't like code takes THAT much space. If you install Lazarus you get a ton of stuff out of the box, aside from the crossplatform WYSIWYG RAD IDE and desktop application framework you also get 2D graphics libraries (with a bunch of image i/o), networking libraries, (de)compression libraries, a webapp framework, database clients, parsers for json, xml, markdown, javascript and a bunch of other stuff (even a parser for the language itself), a TUI framework, bindings for a bunch of external libraries and other stuff. And all that stuff (or at least most of it) work on all the platforms the compiler supports. Yes, using FPC you can probably (didn't try) make a pretty markdown viewer with inline JPG and PNG display support that runs on Windows 3.1 :-P. Unfortunately some people are trying to break this and introduce online package management, but so far at least FPC and Lazarus comes out of the box with not just batteries included but an entire carton of batteries just in case :-P.