Dicebot:
Is anyone aware why this counter appoach was used instead?
It's not sound, it's a hack. Putting unreliable hacks in a standard library is very bad. It's even worse than the problems that Walter has listed for __COUNT__ (I didn't ask for that count in my enhancement request. If you have to copy it's often better to copy from Lisp/ML/Ada instead of C++).
Bye, bearophile