On Tue, Jan 24, 2023 at 9:07 PM Giuseppe D'Angelo via Std-Proposals
<std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> It's a bit unfortunate that braced lists are still a weird datatype.

They aren't *supposed* to be a datatype. Braced-init-lists,
grammatically speaking, aren't even *expressions*.

They were supposed to have one job: to initialize objects. As a
grammatical construct, that's all they do. The `initializer_list` type
was introduced as a way to provide user-defined initialization of
objects that take sequences of values.

Unfortunately, that clear, reasonable design is being replaced, bit by
bit. They're now becoming an expedient way to make small lists of
numbers as if they were literals. Of course, the fact that
braced-init-lists *still* are not expressions keeps forcing these
`initializer_list` hack-fixes onto things instead of finally sitting
down and deciding what exactly this grammatical construct ought to be
used for.

It hasn't quite gotten as bad as lambda abuse has gotten, but every
standard library function that gets an `initializer_list` overload
when it *isn't* initializing a container is just one more step in that
process.