Is there a downside to declaring variables with auto in C++?

Question

It seems that auto was a fairly significant feature to be added in C++11 that seems to follow a lot of the newer languages. As with a language like Python, I ha

Answer 1

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, but suppose you are calculating the factorial of something:

#include 
using namespace std;

int main() {
    auto n = 40;
    auto factorial = 1;

    for(int i = 1; i <=n; ++i)
    {
        factorial *= i;
    }

    cout << "Factorial of " << n << " = " << factorial <

This code will output this:

Factorial of 40 = 0
Size of factorial: 4

That was definetly not the expected result. That happened because auto deduced the type of the variable factorial as int because it was assigned to 1.