To be fair, maintaining compatibility with existing software (including libc) is the reason, either directly or indirectly, for many (most?) of the gotchas in C

To be fair, maintaining compatibility with existing software (including libc) is the reason, either directly or indirectly, for many (most?) of the gotchas in C++. Then again "your C code is valid C++ code!" was perhaps the biggest selling point of C++ when it came out.