If the author is taken aback by '->' vs. '.' and by true and false being 1 and 0, I'm surprised they haven't mentioned digraphs and trigraphs, or the alien <name> syntax for #include!
The only place I've ever seen a trigraph is in malicious c code style content. It's a terrible idea for sure, but not a problem in pratice... to the point that gcc at least used to require an extra flag to turn them on