[sperry]

Dean, all that talk about compilers, and yet no relevance to the problem with Word's awful conversion to HTML?

You might convince me that given enough development time, pure assembly development will out perform high-level language. But ASM is in itself a language... it still needs to be compiled into machine code. So, you might as well just develop in ones and zeros! Compilers are leaps and bounds better than I think you realize... but yes, it is a layer of abstraction. Your general point is taken: higher level languages reduce development effort and/or development time at the cost of code space/efficiency.

But that argument does not correlate to Word. Sure, you're reducing development time by editing in Word, but you're also getting orders of magnitude worse HTML. By using .NET I can program a system in a month that would take 40 years in ASM, and my resulting code would be maybe 1% bloated. By using Word you save maybe 10 minutes on a 60 minute project, get results that don't match your design, don't conform to the standard, and bloat the HTML by 10 times.

You can try to justify it with "but I'm knowingly trading bloat for development efficiency", but the results speak for themselves: Word is a terrible tool for HTML. Something like Dreamweaver (or whatever the pros use these days) would turn a 60 minute job into a 10 minute job and generate HTML that's 99% as good as hand-coded (if not better since it would most likely be more efficient with style-sheets and the like). I'm not arguing that hi-level development tools are bad; I'm arguing that for HTML, Word is not a high-level development tool.

My point with the "include" was to illustrate how outdated you are in terms of the current state of software development. People don't use C/C++, at least not for enterprise level development... it's too low level. I haven't used a makefile since 1998, and I haven't explicitly run a compiler since I started getting paid to program. Tools these days handle the includes out of sight of the developer. External code use is bigger than ever, hell .NET itself is a library that uses other libraries. The shear mass of code needed to do things like a SOAP based service oriented architecture would turn a simple distributed "Hello World" application into a 5 year 20 person development project if you were to do it in C with no external resources. But using these libraries now days is trivial, it's all built into the development tools.