I don't see any goods in looking at the specification of a language when choosing your weapons. One'd better see what other coders could do with a language and maybe have a look at how easy it was achieved to decide which one to take. Thus I'd rewrite your question as What powers and what flaws do I get from which programming language?

As for Java I wouldn't take any statement in the direction of clean design, portability and other things from a JavaCockey for serious if I look at the flaws the language already piled up in so few years of existance compared to the lifetime of other languages I don't want to start a flame war here - I simply don't like the language. There is no reason at all to take me for serious here :-)

I'm not really a CompSciProfessional, I'm just argueing from the heart, and many real professionals always come down to (common) lisp if it comes to clean everything.

I am quite happy with perl (just as I am with ruby ;-) - it did many jobs for me, with or without specs. Just my TwoCents...

Regards...	Stefan
you begin bashing the string with a +42 regexp of confusion