what was wrong with struct & class in C++?

[Walter Bright]

Russell Lewis wrote:
> Hear, hear!  Good arguments, all!  It still doesn't answer why we left 
> out the little star on class-reference variable assignments.  As I've 
> argued before, the question of syntax is orthogonal to the question of 
> legal operations.  Make value-style operations illegal for classes, and 
> keep the star there, IMHO.

It would make writing generic code unnecessarily difficult.