The 'original sin' of C++ is not having both references and pointers, but trying to remain compatible with C. That means that Stroustrup couldn't have ditched

The 'original sin' of C++ is not having both references and pointers, but trying to remain compatible with C. That means that Stroustrup couldn't have ditched pointers, but if he wanted to implement operator overloading for value types with same efficiency as C he needed some way to support doing that without using pointers directly: http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq2.html#pointers-and-references http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq2.html#pointers-and-referenc... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8007832/could-operator-overloading-have-worked-without-references http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8007832/could-operator-ov... A lot of the nastiness of C++ comes from trying to maintain C compatibility: Special behavior for POD, most vexing parse, .h/.cc file split, everything preprocessor and many other misfeatures. Of course, there's also the flip side of it: if C++ wasn't a near-superset of C, it would have never become so popular.