What specific design aims guided the committee?
Naturally, different people and different organizations involved with the standardization have somewhat different aims, especially when it comes to details and to priorities. Also, detailed aims change over time. Please remember that the committee can’t even do all that everyone agrees would be good things — it consists of volunteers with very limited resources. However, here are a set of criteria that has seen real use in the discussion of which features and libraries were appropriate for C++0x: • Maintain stability and compatibility — don’t break old code, and if you absolutely must, don’t break it quietly. • Prefer libraries to language extensions — an ideal at which the committee wasn’t all that successful; too many people in the committee and elsewhere prefer “real language features.” • Prefer generality to specialization — focus on improving the abstraction mechanisms (classes, templates, etc.). • Support both experts and novices — novices can be helped by better libraries a
