On Charm and Beauty Decays -a Theorist's Perspective*

The present understanding of charm and bottom decays is reviewed. Special emphasis is placed on discussing the theoretical uncertainties in view of the particularly rich harvest of new data from the last year. A semi-quantitative description of D decays has emerged enabling us to address rather detailled and relatively subtle questions there, like on once and twice Cabibbo suppressed decays. Beauty physics having left its infancy is now in its adolescence; its future development towards maturity is analyzed. I. Motivation Giving a review talk is like playing simultaneous chess; not much attention is paid to the games you win-almost everybody focuses on the ones you lose, on your failures. The similarity between the two situations extends also to the question on which strategy to adopt: Do you attribute the same weight to every opponent/problem and divide your time equally among them? Or do you exercise some personal judgement by dividing the field into " easy, tough and entertaining " ? Then you proceed to run over the first kind and draw honorably with the second kind; that way you boost your confidence and gain in respectability. Finally you