Allow me to clarify your confusion with a quote:
I am simply providing a reason why languages often must consider more than your metric. I even said that it was a good metric, I simply had issues about its completeness. I'm not apologizing for anything out here, and I'll be the first one to say that certain things have been done far better in other languages. I simply wish to widen the view that you provided.
You're being silly. I offer some history and a major feature related to that history, and you say I'm judging entirely by the history. This feature is even part of the "important point" I had to quote due to your missing it the first time! Now you've missed it again *and* leapt to a false conclusion. For shame. To make it completely black and white to you: This history shows why C++ is backwards compatible with C. I judge by *features* not history, and this is a ridiculously important feature.
I meant what I said.
If you're talking about Rational Purify, it does indeed support C++. If you're talking about Pure Software's Purify, it also supports C++. If the exact same debugger and tools is gdb, gprof, and valgrind, which is what the vast majority of the mud community uses, then I'm also right. Most memory debugging tools I've used simply preload and hook into malloc/free, so they don't care what language is being used. Of course all of the C-compliant code that you write is still debuggable by the C-only tools (like lint), but there is a C++ equivalent for almost any operation.
It's a good thing we have you to clarify the psychology of the programmer. Don't you think that it's best to let the programmer decide what he wants to do, rather than deciding it for him? I can think of dozens of scenarios where moving a C codebase to C++ don't include your two extrapolations: It could be for library support (yes, there are C++-only libraries), educational purposes, or to sync the codebase with with a planned migration to a different paradigm in which individual modules are added onto or replaced.
I think the people over at Trolltech would disagree with you, and they're adding features onto an already large featureset. For those that aren't aware of the best gui toolkit around, Qt uses a meta-object compiler to add signal/slot functionality to C++.
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