Actually, originally there was some kind of BASIC for '52 so I can hardly think of something less efficient. C++ is not evil if you know what you're doing and take only what you really need from the "++" part. Say, constructor/destructor is very handy tool, the functionality requires some work in plain C. But classes and object-oriented programming makes sense only in really big projects where many different people work on the code and they must be able to put their pieces easily together. It helps in team development process but decreases code efficiency. C is a reasonable choice for '51 because it's kind of "structured assembler." Usually from basic structures 1 C instruction corresponds to 3-4 machine code instructions. With C++ the ratio jumps to hundreds...