IAMA C++ Ask Me Anything

Go ahead, I, the mighty, wonderful, beautiful, athletic C++ will answer all your questions!

I'm interested in the reason for the disparity. Is operator< consider a mistake? Wouldn't operator## or similar be much simpler to implement, and much more sensible to use?

As it stands the compiler is basically searching for a random specialization of a strange template in some unknown file which describes how to hash objects of a particular class. The coupling there is... strange to say the least.