I assume that a sufficiently skilled will be able to do anything not explicitly forbidden by the hardware.

Defining OO as based on the use of class hierarchies and virtual functions is also practical in that it provides some guidance as to where OO is likely to be successful.

With the increasing importance of standards for system-level objects such as COM and CORBA, it is particularly important that the C++ bindings to those be clean, well documented, and simple to use.

I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining

Tom [Cargil]s suggestion with a further idea: Propsers of new [C++] features should be required to donate a kidney. That would - Jim [Waldo] pointed out - make people think hard before proposing, and even people without any sense would propose at most two extensions.

I assume that a sufficiently skilled will be able to do anything not explicitly forbidden by the hardware.

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer