Sure, and no one is saying it was a good idea in the first place. CINT was notoriously bad as a C++ interpreter, in fact it was marketed as being able to parse

Sure, and no one is saying it was a good idea in the first place. CINT was notoriously bad as a C++ interpreter, in fact it was marketed as being able to parse 90% of valid C++ code. Imagine someone selling a compiler that way? But CERN developed a huge amount of CINT code anyway, and all of CERNs legacy sort-of C++ code that ran on CINT became a maintenance nightmare. Cling is a huge upgrade in the sense that it supports all this legacy code with a _lot_ less overhead than before.