> C++ is not a strict superset of C.

I know that. I use both C and C++ practically daily. The post was partly joking. But only partly (for example of course I could live without templates if really needed but seriously they make some jobs a lot better and easier). Hence I aptly phrased it some kind of C hoping (idly it seems) no one would trip over it because it's obviously not C.

>C++ is not a strict subset of C.

I think you flipped this :) ?

Using both C and C++, each in their place, I actually do think they are.

auto was taken in exactly the same way in C++ until fairly recently. They re-purposed it because it was obsolescent.

auto was already in vanishing disuse in C at the time ANSI C came out in 1989.

The C++ use of auto resurrects an aspect of the way auto was used in the C predecessor languages B and NB.

In these pre-C languages, everything was an integer cell. A declaration of local variables looked like this:

   auto x, y;

the auto meant automatic storage (stack), but the real purpose here is syntactic: the auto is a declaration specifier, which makes the above construct a declaration. There is no indication of type, because it is implicit. Without the auto it would look like a comma expression with no effect.

This implicit typing survived into C for "implicit int" return values, like "main () {...}". But type specifiers were introduced and became mandatory in declarations, and so auto became unnecessary verbiage since all it did now was specify a storage class that was already the default one.

C++ resurrect the syntactic use of auto in a way: once again, it provides declaration syntax that allows the type specifier to be omitted. This time, of course, that type is inferred rather than assumed integer.