Hiding class pointers -- was it a good idea?

[Russell Lewis]

Walter Bright wrote:
> That's known as the 'slicing' problem. It's pernicious in that it can be 
> extremely hard to expose via testing or code reviews, yet will expose 
> the program to unpredictable behavior.

It frustrates me that people keep conflating what are orthogonal 
questions, such as:
   - Should we allow copy-assignments of class types?
   - Should we allow classes on the stack?
   - Should we use '*' to declare pointers-to-classes?

Those are 3 *VERY* different questions.  IMHO, we should disallow 
copy-assignments of class types (compiler detects the problem and spits 
out a clear error message, thus trivially educating the beginners), but 
still require the '*'.