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Message: [QUOTE="James Kanze, post: 3452487"] Any ugliness would be hidden in map_initializer, so who cares. That's not really the issue---you're going to deep copy the map anyway, so a little more or less shouldn't matter. The issue is really one of semantics. Using insert or operator[] have different semantics in the case of duplicates, and in the case of insert, you can easily check the return value, and generate an error (exception or assertion failure) in case of duplicates, which is probably the most useful semantics. You could, but I don't see what that buys you. Insertion without the hint (or with the wrong hint) is O(ln n). With the hint, it is O(1), but lower_bound is O(ln n), so there's no point in using it just to provide a hint. Which could also be a very important advantage if one of the types didn't support default construction. All in all: forget about optimization---good design requires the use of insert. [/QUOTE]