> 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.