Right. At the time, as I understand it, the standards committee thought reference semantics and operator overloading would be powerful enough to create perfect

Right. At the time, as I understand it, the standards committee thought reference semantics and operator overloading would be powerful enough to create perfect "proxy" objects that would be indistinguishable from their direct equivalents. std::vector<bool> ended up demonstrating the opposite. std::bitset<N> is quite nice though, as long as you have a fixed size.