I, too, went straight for the vectors and maps when I started to program in C++ and agree that they are not as convenient as arrays and hashes on Perl. But it is nice that they are there. It makes C++ almost bearable.

I really miss simple, yet powerful syntax for regular expressions as well. Boost regex is a step in the right direction, but these have the impression of being bolted on rather than a part of the core language, and so are less elegant.

Other than powerful data structures, the things I miss most when programming C/C++ are the control statments. After years in Perl it is natural to say 'do this if condition is true", but one has to rewrtie the sentence in C/C++ 'if (condition is true) do this. ". I miss 'unless' as well. When I have to stop to rearrange my logic to suite limited C/C++ control contstructs, it distracts me and the flow of ideas into code is not as smooth.

On the other side of the fence, there is probably some Haskell or Lisp coder cursing out perl's inadequate tail recursion support :)