C++: Weird looping mechanism

In the old days (sigh!!!) when I used to code in C++, I unfortunately had a friend with a knack of doing/finding weird ways of programing. One day he asked me the following question

How do you write a program in C++ which does not have any looping construct and yet it can print a string n-times, even though the string is present only once in the source file and its not called multiple (n) times.

The answer goes as

 #include <iostream>
using namespace std;
class MyClass
{
public:
    MyClass()
    {
        cout << "Hello World" << endl;
    }
};
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    MyClass mc[10];
    return 0;
}

In C++, classes are not reference types and when you declare an array as above you actually create an initialized array of objects on the stack. So all the n-elements of the arrays is allocated and initialized by calling its default constructor. So for a n-element array the ctor is called n-times and you can print the string as many times using this.

Why would someone ever need to do something like this, beats me :). This became a sort of joke between us and when I joined MSFT and started working on .NET and sent him an email, saying that I was happy working in a language where you cannot do this kind of a thing.

When I first saw the bullet in the feature list of C# 3.0 that read "collection initializer" I was a bit scared. I thought maybe C# would support some construct in which the compiler will initialize all the elements of a collection/array by allocating the element with calls to default/some ctor. Fortunately thats not the case. For an example on object/collection initializer in C# 3.0 see here.