WHICH LANGUAGE SHOULD WE USE?

Remember Lisp? Java was considered... Good experiences developing and porting with Tk/Tcl. Avoid a reliance on Perl. C++ was the obvious choice as a tradeoff between stability, standardization, and efficiency.

Strategy: EGCS: finally a convergence on versions of GNU's gcc, and the necessary enhancements to conform to the ANSI C++ standard. CYGWIN: Provide a common "Unix" environment across all platforms.