Working on different projects this week–though not as many as you’d think, given what I’m about to enumerate–I’ve had to work literally simultaneously in Delphi (Pascal), VB.NET, C#.NET, JavaScript, VBScript, PHP, Python, XSLT, XPath, XQuery, T-SQL, and MySQL… that I can remember. Half of these are object-based, half are procedural (technically, a couple are neither). The part of my brain that differentiates between Len(Str), Length(Str), Str.length, StrLen(Str), StrLength(Str), string-length(Str) and sizeof(Str) is baked. We won’t even get into whether “Str” is a string, an object, a buffer, a pointer, an ANSI string, a PChar, an array of Byte, an array of char, a Unicode string or a variant.

If you understood more than 20% of that, I’m kind of sad for you. You probably want one of these.