[Rochus]

Right. There were even regular puzzle columns in magazines where people had to figure out what a piece of C++ actually did. This is how template metaprogramming eventually came to light, when a few very clever minds figured out how to use it to implement even conditions and loops, for example - possibilities that even the inventor of the language had not anticipated. So, C++98 was in no way simple, but definitively much more simple than C++ today.