>> much more concise, elegant code

compared with other C++ code that is :-).

It doesn't really "shrink" the language. It adds a level of abstraction. But the problem is that it doesn't really implement the abstraction very well. The complexity doesn't go away, you still have all std::vector<std::ostream::operator<<std::iterator<T><2<std::bla_bla>>>> underneath, and if you make a small error in the code, compiler will still spit out an incomprehensible error message.

What's the relevance to Stroustrup being concise?

C# 2.0/ECMA-334 4th edition [1] is specified on 553 pages - Microsoft did not submit later versions. The underlying virtual machine, the common type system, the assembly language and so on are specified in ECMA-335 6th edition [2] on 574 pages supplemented with 161,593 lines of XML (plus 155 lines DTD) specifying the base class library.

TR/84 [3] provides tools to generate documentation in various formats from the mentioned XML file. The included output as PDF sums up to 5,868 pages.

Finally there is TR/89 [4] describing some more generic types on 67 pages.

[1] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

[2] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

[3] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/techreports/E...

[4] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/techreports/E...