Huge strawman and not at all common outside of the "we invert the norms up to 11" crowd.
The article opens with excerpts from the authors entry into The International Obfuscated C Code Contest which indicates the kind of crowd that treated such hijinks as commonplace.
You didn't see such things in dull boring let's just make simple code that works projects.
You'd see all that and more in the end of town that wanted to sketch out new language ideas ... the first "working" C++ implementations were made by swapping out the default C preprocessor for a more powerful text manipulation engine and really going to town on the macro magic.
It looked like early C++ but it went through a text mangling and came out as C and went into C compilers of the day.
ADDENDUM: I'm pretty sure the first C++ mockup I saw | worked with was the FrankenChild of source.txt | M4 preprocessor | C compiler | Asm | link
<nod> thanks, yeah I was actually a student at UCF where some OCCC winners were instructors (David Van Brackle and Mark Schnitzius, if memory serves).
And, I actually used `cfront` in my first job, and used the parameter to see the C it spit out as a way to learn how C++ did some things. Pretty interesting, if, as you say, nearly unreadable to humans!
The article opens with excerpts from the authors entry into The International Obfuscated C Code Contest which indicates the kind of crowd that treated such hijinks as commonplace.
You didn't see such things in dull boring let's just make simple code that works projects.
You'd see all that and more in the end of town that wanted to sketch out new language ideas ... the first "working" C++ implementations were made by swapping out the default C preprocessor for a more powerful text manipulation engine and really going to town on the macro magic.
It looked like early C++ but it went through a text mangling and came out as C and went into C compilers of the day.
ADDENDUM: I'm pretty sure the first C++ mockup I saw | worked with was the FrankenChild of source.txt | M4 preprocessor | C compiler | Asm | link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language)
but that's going back a ways.