I missed your mention of the 'most vexing parse' before writing this up, but for those not in the know, here's another fun quirk of C++ syntax: Declare a local

I missed your mention of the 'most vexing parse' before writing this up, but for those not in the know, here's another fun quirk of C++ syntax: Declare a local named neko of type Kitten, passing a value to its constructor: Kitten neko(42); Declare a local named neko of type Kitten, without passing a value to its constructor: Kitten neko; Declare a function named neko with zero parameters and with return type Kitten: Kitten neko(); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_vexing_parse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_vexing_parse , https://stackoverflow.com/a/620149/ https://stackoverflow.com/a/620149/