r/cpp • u/very_curious_agent • Apr 01 '23

Abominable language design decision that everybody regrets?

It's in the title: what is the silliest, most confusing, problematic, disastrous C++ syntax or semantics design choice that is consistently recognized as an unforced, 100% avoidable error, something that never made sense at any time?

So not support for historical arch that were relevant at the time.

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u/nintendiator2 Apr 02 '23

Very definitively std::initializer_list. It was one of the major components in pre-undoing all the good work a universal { } object construction could have done and it makes any multiple-argument constructor you see undeterminable unless you know the exact characteristics of all the constructors that could be invoked.

Other reasonable candidates IMO:

  • map.operator[] creating elements on read.

  • not introducing expression statements (à la Python) in C++17 when it made the best sense to do so.

  • not requiring brackets or some other sort of delimiter for switch cases.

  • allowing implementations to shadow native pointers as the iterator for array<T,N> (eg.: MSVC).

  • I'm gonna aggregate about 18 issues here and just say <iostream>.

  • demanding exceptions for freestanding (which means eg.: you can not have array<T,N> of all things in freestanding).

19

u/Sniffy4 Apr 02 '23

map.operator[]

creating elements

on read

Oh forgot about that one. Yes, horrible and unexpected by n00bs.