Let's bring up some technical details to see whether there is a deliberate thought process behind the evolution of C++. Recent versions of C++ have the auto key

Let's bring up some technical details to see whether there is a deliberate thought process behind the evolution of C++. Recent versions of C++ have the auto keyword. It's a cool new feature grafted onto C++ from other languages and meant to make the programmer's life easier. It lets you avoid typing things like for (std::vector<std::pair<int, double>>::const_iterator it = v.begin(); it != v.end(); ++it) { foo(*it); } The above used to be the recommended way to write a loop until C++11, and was supposedly superior to for (int i = 0; i < v.size(); ++i) { foo(v[i]); } which was considered to be error prone and unsafe. But now things are much nicer and you can write for (auto x : v) { foo(x); } Looks so much better. Clearly "auto" is a win for C++ programmers. But wait, it turns out that there's actually a bunch of different ways of writing the auto keyword that have subtly different semantics. You can write "auto", but you can also use every possible combination of "auto" with "const", "&" and "&&". So things like "auto&&" or "const auto&" are also perfectly valid and sometimes preferable to simple old "auto". Let's put aside the fact that you can't explain the difference between "*", "&" and "&&" to a C programmer without them bursting out laughing. Why does auto have six different variants? Isn't this emblematic of how C++ is evolving?