I always miss python's built-in doc strings when working in other languages. I know this may seem odd, but it allows me to cut down significantly on excess comments while still providing a clean description of my code and any interfaces therein.

• What Language Feature Can You Just Not Live Without?

If someone were building a new language and they asked you what one feature they absolutely must include, what would it be?

This is getting kind of long, so I figured I'd do my best to summarize:

Paraphrased to be language agnostic. If you know of a language which uses something mentioned, please at it in the parenthesis to the right of the feature. And if you have a better format for this list, by all means try it out (if it doesn't seem to work, I'll just roll back).

Regular Expressions ~ torial (Perl)

Garbage Collection ~ SaaS Developer (Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, .NET)

Anonymous Functions ~ Vinko Vrsalovic (Lisp, Python)

Arithmetic Operators ~ Jeremy Ross (Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, C#, Visual Basic, C, C++, Pascal, Smalltalk, etc.)

Exception Handling ~ torial (Python, Java, .NET)

Pass By Reference ~ Chris (Python)

Unified String Format WalloWizard (C#)

Generics ~ torial (Python, Java, C#)

Integrated Query Equivalent to LINQ ~ Vyrotek (C#)

Namespacing ~ Garry Shutler ()

Short Circuit Logic ~ Adam Bellaire ()