I think we can call that "the COBOL effect".

Arne

This sounds similar to an author being interested in spelling and
grammar but not content or meaning.

Some problems are more generic and their solutions can be applied to
many projects in many businesses but we still need to understand the
problem.

However in most of my work the users tend to be uncertain of their
requirements and hence I need a solid understanding of the business in
order to design the software and recognise common business patterns.

im interested in the sort of thing you refer to ?

for example, I had a decision tree I wrote in c++ wich it generated from
some input data,
there was quite a bit of recusrion or loops wich had to be handled by
recognising
repeating branches and instead of going onto infinity just looping the
branch back to some equivalent point.

this meant often an entire branch would be deleted but at the time of
deletion
some of the elements in the branch may be still used elsewhere,
although elements might be used by things in the same branch wich was about
to be deleted.

with c# this is taken care of, you just simply unreference it and it
eventually deletes anything that
isnt referenced from some static point.
I had to write the code to do the same thing with my tree.

I remember it took me a long time to find the right page wich told me how to
print out
a simple hex dump with 2 hex digits for each byte,
I found 100s of pages wich told me how to print out the basic stuff with
String.Format but stoped short of saying how to print out exactly 2 digits.
most other things I seemed to find fairly easy.

ok I know its not dificult, its easy when you know how, but its just new.
I made the mistake of thinking it was easy transition,
instead of treating it as a new language and burying my head in a few books
for a few days.

its not a question of just noting they dont exist,
but what I meant was if your realy used to using a macro
for certain things it can be hard to code the the equivalent of the macro
template functions can be used but I find they are limited ...

for example I have several structs wich have some of the same elements and I
want to
have a function wich does the same operation on those elements for diferent
structs...
in a template function I cant access any members of a <type> unless I put a
constraint,
but then I am limited to only alowing one class, unless I am mistaken or
there is a way round this?
unfortunatly I dont have the option to add an interface to the structs
definition.

a macro would easily take care of this.
again the same for multiple inheritence, sometimes its just difuclt to
figure out how to do the equivalent.
although I think macros can be very badly misused, and multiple inheritence
could realy suck sometimes.

yep transition the other way is probably dificult too,
I still need C/C++ for my microcontrollers though,
its like switching to a diferent world.
and ofc its still usefull to know basic c++ if you want to do some unsafe
stuff in c#...

Colin =^.^=

That's a good point.  Pascal is one of the languages I've never come in
contact with, but if it makes life as simple as "(1) load IO library (2)
print something" then I imagine it would be a very good choice.