> I also believe the feature (auto) makes sense for C++ with its verbose and lengthy types nobody but your compiler cares about (say, e.g., multimap::equal_rang

> I also believe the feature (auto) makes sense for C++ with its verbose and lengthy types nobody but your compiler cares about (say, e.g., multimap::equal_range). For C? Get out of here.. It's more than convenience. auto is effectively mandatory in many cases where the return type of templates/functions is private to the implementation (lambdas being the most common example, but libraries like hana make extensive use of such private types).