A few points: If you don't want to deal with begin/end, there are lots of utility libraries, and there's not much reason to standardize it. For example, here i

A few points: If you don't want to deal with begin/end, there are lots of utility libraries, and there's not much reason to standardize it. For example, here is Google's wrapper library (disclosure: my employer) that takes "just the container": https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/algorithm/container.h https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/algori... Regarding your edit: it's pretty simple in c++ to alias namespaces as needed for your project. The standards committee is working with a big install base, and they have a few hard requirements. They don't break the ABI. They try not to break calling code in other ways. (Adding overloads while client code passes around pointers to your functions can have surprising effects - perhaps causing their code to stop compiling? Pretty sure one of abseil's requests is that clients don't take addresses of their functions for this reason Stack overflow on taking addresses of overloaded functions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2942426/how-do-i-specify-a-pointer-to-an-overloaded-function https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2942426/how-do-i-specify... Abseil compat guidelines: https://abseil.io/about/compatibility https://abseil.io/about/compatibility)