yep, in 1993 some graybeard working on GCC checked files by last modification date to do some refactoring and saw one that hadn't changed since july 7, 1926, aptly called "alexandrescu.c". When he opened it, his computer started glowing yellow and his BSD prompt suddenly changed from '$' to '>'. He executed the testcase associated and the horror happened... a 666 kilobyte dump of template error was uploaded right into comp.lang.c++, which blew the poor hacker's 486DX away. Since then templates roam free again in our universe.
OR
when people say that it was discovered, it's that it was discovered during the process of designing templates and they found it nice, so they kept it.
That's a bit of an uncharitable reading, no? For others that would like to make up their own mind: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1253...