I was a cfront beta site using MPW; for people that don't know, that was the self-compiling C++ from C, before the first AT&T C++ compiler, in the late 1980s.
I agree and we are saying the same thing. There was no C++ compiler, the C++ language was processed by cfront, similar to the preprocessor and include compile phase. AT&T supplied cfront. The language spec was changing. I wrote applications with it, not checking "language lawyer" syntax problems. I wrote general feedback on performance, and things that would make the language practical. It is hard to describe those days, but concepts of object-oriented programming were new to many people, and I was quite interested in building actual applications. The linker was the common linker for multiple other languages, like gcc today.