How is this different from what Harvard Apparatus is already doing in clinical studies?

Well, technically speaking, if your C++ spins python instances, it's JIT as well. Not to mention that it might be generating and loading shared libs (or at least accepting some sort of signed injected shared libs) in order to deal with unpredictability of changing requirements. I am actually somewhat baffled that the same people who think that dynamically generated shared libs are clever can be the people who think that JIT runtimes are crutches.

Having said that, let me actually get to your point. Semantically, C++ is C + syntactic sugar. So, while it's not implemented this way (anymore), it can be. So can any other language which has a run-time similar to that of C. Once you allow for language costructs which call into the native C libs on a platform, your language is good to go to be pre-processed into C at compile time and than compiled with whatever compiles your C.

BTW, syntactic sugar is not an insult. Syntactic sugar is a Good Thing (TM). It allows to offload to machines work which would otherwise have to be done by humans.

an hour by train or 2 hours by car.

Except that this

is not the case. Giulliani to deal with 2-3 feet of snow in 1 night ('95 or '96) and the city was back to normal within a few days. Effective didn't require national guard or anything. The city managed it. Effective leaders are effective.

Not really. There was a time when NYC got 2.5 feet of snow under Giuliani. Subways didn't run for a full day or two AFTER the snow. Effective government is effective. Delusional government is full of hot air.

nature laughs.

Minerals (such as table salt) can be found without any additives containing DNA.

"Cheaper" is hardly the issue. Salaries can be adjusted. But forcing citizens to compete on workplace conditions with "guests" for whom getting fired is an equivalent of getting deported is quite another story.

it's portable, doesn't require a runtime and had bindings in most languages you'll want to use.

OO is a nuisance. If C just added direct access to the return value space instead pushing the whole return value on stack, OO would have been an esoteric footnote in some theoretical comp sci book. Instead, you get a paradigm which mixes data and code in one name space and completely takes attention away from the duality between data and functions. Oh, and without yield, no one would have heard of Python. You'd just here the gripes about whitespace being overly restrictive from everyone who wants braces. yield is what makes Python elegant. Metaclasses (ie, post-creation templates) and descriptors (ie, pre-creation templates) are actually somewhat cludgy. You understand that you can do everything in Python without ever having to worry about creating a single queue simply because of yield, do you not? Do you really not see how that simplifies code?Breadth-first tree traversal via simple recursion? Show me what other language will let you do that.

I was wondering why ALA stopped offering them altogether after the New Year's. I guess they knew something was coming ahead of time and didn't want their name to be pushed into the mudslinging to come.

ASN.1 is a way to universally describe data. It's expressible in multiple languages though. So the gp is right.

Nah, C++ itself is the problem. Linus got it right. Instead of standardizing name mangling and RTTI, the language went in the direction of accomodating everyone who didn't think to use auto_ptr when returning containers from functions. The whole reason for virtual functions is to get around huge case statements resolving discriminated unions. But without standard discriminators for these discriminated unions (and relying on points into virtual table instead) these cannot be persisted or sent over the network. So you end up with people still using multiple enumeration schemes which cannot be even logged in a consistent way. Mess, mess, mess!

I don't remember the full list of programming languages that I use or have used at some point (yeah, like you remember that Expect script that you wrote 15 years ago), but I can promise you that Mathematica is, in fact, different. It lets you mix the compile-time and run-time constructs (and treat them pretty much the same). The only think that is even close to being as revolutionary as Mathematica is Python's "yield" keyword (which allows functions to not only be a substitute for a stack abstraction, but also for a queue abstraction).

If the DOJ needs data stored in Ireland, why not ask Ireland first? It's not exactly a safe heaven for drug trafficking. I am sure they'd extradite a drug dealer. So they would release any data in drug trafficking case. DOJ just wants to prove that they shouldn't have to ask?