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

[Walter Bright]

Russell Lewis wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> ????  I thought that one of the key arguments for putting the syntax 
> back to the C++ way was that it would make generic code easier to write. 
>  Right now, when we perform an assignment, generic code can't know 
> (without specialization) whether it is assigning a value or a reference 
> type.

Because if I replace a struct with a class, then I have to go through 
every use of the struct and add a *.