Initializing an object or assigning some literal value to it using a single statement is a succinct way of generating the contents of the object. It is easy to do this for simple variables like numeric variables or strings, because there are readily available literals. On the other hand, there are no simple syntactic means of initializing containers with arbitrary sets of values. This is because expressing more complex objects with nontrivial internal data structures as literals is difficult. Using some ingenious patterns and overloaded operators, the Boost.Assign library makes it possible to initialize and assign values to a whole host of STL and Boost containers, using a very expressive syntax.

With the availability of the new initializer list and uniform initialization syntax in C++11, these tasks can be accomplished without Boost.Assign. Still Boost.Assign is the only means of getting the job done on pre-C++11, and also provides...