> The way most other languages handle it is that the list literal construct just creates a list, and if you want something else then you need to explicitly conv

> The way most other languages handle it is that the list literal construct just creates a list, and if you want something else then you need to explicitly convert. > For example, in Python: > x = [1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13] # this is a list of integers > y = set([1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13]) # this is a set of integers Actually, that's not the best way to do it: y = {1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13} # this is a set of integers without creating a list first. z = set(1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13) # so is this In C++ {} is syntactic sugar for "Create an initializer_list with these values," which is what happens when it's assigned to an "auto" variable. Not surprising at all. If you want a different type, you need to specify the type that you want. Maybe it's confusing to beginners and people who don't take the time to learn the language, but C++ isn't catering to those people. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of "gotchas" in C++, I just don't think the two you've posted are very bad.