What point are you trying to make that you need the "most cutting edge" compilers? C++11 just came out: of course you need a cutting edge compiler. That won't

What point are you trying to make that you need the "most cutting edge" compilers? C++11 just came out: of course you need a cutting edge compiler. That won't be true for that much longer though. The template machinery isn't that horrible. Certainly not so significant as to seriously impact programmer productivity. A brace-enclosed initializer list of ints (e.g. { 1, 2, 3, 4 }) is considered a std::initializer_list<int> and this is what a constructor taking such an initializer list looks like: T (std::initializer_list<int> l) { for (int i : l) { // Do something with i (e.g. copy it into the data structure) } } In fact, the C++ designers have created a basic data structure that's defined in the language itself: std::initializer_list. It's just so minimal that it's only used to initialize more complex, user-defined types. That way programmers have the benefit of the "syntactic sugar" even for data types that the C++ designers never could have envisioned.