What is the purpose of std::make_pair vs the constructor of std::pair?

The difference is that with std::pair you need to specify the types of both elements, whereas std::make_pair will create a pair with the type of the elements that are passed to it, without you needing to tell it. That's what I could gather from various docs anyways.

See this example from http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/std/utility/make_pair/

pair <int,int> one;
pair <int,int> two;

one = make_pair (10,20);
two = make_pair (10.5,'A'); // ok: implicit conversion from pair<double,char>

Aside from the implicit conversion bonus of it, if you didn't use make_pair you'd have to do

one = pair<int,int>(10,20)

every time you assigned to one, which would be annoying over time...

As @MSalters replied above, you can now use curly braces to do this in C++11 (just verified this with a C++11 compiler):

pair<int, int> p = {1, 2};