Meh, this is a straw-man. Conventionally rejecting overridden -> and () operators is a very long reach from ending up back at C. Disallowing operator overriding in general (as opposed to specific operators), namespaces, and classes would be much closer, and it still wouldn't be all that close to C (reinterpret_cast, templates...) There is a goodly sized amount of gray area between the two. Or did you mean your "things like that" to be much broader than my interpretation?