Do you really consider it an invention? I think they mean inventions done by the committee (like <locale.h>). ISO C++ has this feature. And so does GNU C via th

Do you really consider it an invention? I think they mean inventions done by the committee (like <locale.h>). ISO C++ has this feature. And so does GNU C via the __auto_type keyword (GCC 4.9 and clang 3.8). History is there but I doubt it's commonly used (in C yet).