"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."-Bjarne Stroustrup.
What does "blowing [my] whole leg off" actually look like?
I am looking to see if there are any conventions or rules I could break out of, in order to gain experience with the flexibility of the c++ language. I heard for example that you can sometimes store data in the "wrong" type, and I was hoping for some more cool ideas for unusual ways to use c++. At the beginning of my journey I used python 3 which was not as "permissive" of language. I want to know besides things like infinite loops, any "ill advised" or funny stuff to do in c++. Of course, I don't want to ruin my machine, but if I could learn how to 'break' c++ it could be a very useful, and entertaining experience.
just program normally. You will encounter enough problems when you make mistakes doing that to cover anything we can say here.
advanced class features, virtual functions, overloading, pointers (which are avoided mostly but still have uses) can all have strange, deep errors that take a bit to unravel. What he is saying is that when you mess up, it can be much harder to find it because its deeper than just a blown pointer or the like that you get in C. I am not sure I totally agree with him, but its a 'rule of thumb' or 'general' statement so if you take it as a broad generalization its accurate enough.