Tag Archives: aggregate types

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Glennan Carnie

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd

Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.

Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)

• Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
• Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
• Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020

An aggregate type in C++ is a type that can be initialised with a brace-enclosed list of initialisers. C++ contains three basic aggregate types, inherited from C:

arrays
structures
unions

Since one of the design goals of C++ was to emulate the behaviour of built-in types it seems reasonable that you should be able to initialise user-defined aggregate types (containers, etc.) in the same way.

A std::initializer_list is a template class that allows a user-defined type to become an aggregate type.

When initialiser list syntax is […]