> And for old legacy code that's sprawling, I find braces help a LOT with keeping track of scope.

How exactly are they more helpful than following the line of the indentation that you're supposed to have as a matter of good style anyway? Do you not have formatting tools? How do you not have a tool that can find the top of a level of indentation, but do have one that can find a paired brace?

>Assembly? I haven't touched raw assembly since college.

How exactly does your debugger know whether the compiled code it stepped into came from C++ or Fortran source?