>>From a legibility point of view COBOL wins hands-down.
>
>Let me guess, you are/were a COBOL programmer, right?

Was. Also Autocoder, Fortran, OS/Assembler. Now the whole point of COBOL was (is) legibility. ALL procedure code was written in English sentences and GOOD COBOL programmers used descriptive condition names to fulfill that goal. So, while something could be written like "IF INPUT = '5' THEN PERFORM SET-FOR-5." and it would run fine, a better rendition would be "IF USER-IS-OUT-OF-COUNTRY THEN PERFORM SETUP-A-FOREIGNER.".

>
>>And my view is that C and its variants lose hands-down.
>
>Of the commonly used high level languages, C and C++ are generally considered to be closest to the hardware. In .NET, C# and Managed C++ are generally considered to produce the most efficient IL code (the machine language of the CLR "Virtual Machine".

Sure, and I recollect that C was designed by programmers, for programmers too. Decidedly not THIS programmer though. And in an era of 2ghz+ CPUs, I wonder how much efficient code really matters any more? Seems that the maintenance (cost) of code is a far larger issue than efficiency of code in todays environment. The single line doing so much that precipitated my reply can hardly be called "easy to maintain" compared to variations that followed.

>
>As far as legibility is concerned, I prefer to work in as high level a language as possible that does not hinder my freedom to express myself in code. In .NET, C# is that language.

Good. I take it that you are the consummate "programmer's programmer". My vote is for VB.NET ***at this point***.

cheers