| Second, it's not clear to me what smart |containers add to this particular problem, given that smart pointers |are available.
I have used container< shared_ptr<T> > extensively and I still felt that it didn't feel good. All the syntax is different with indirection all over the place and something as simple as vec.push_back( new Foo ) expanding into vec.push_back( shared_ptr<Foo>( new Foo ) ) and different cast styles etc.
I usually can take such syntax, but I worked and do work with people that are just plain confused by all that syntactic overhead. For them, I think the smart pinter interface is part of the problem.
Why can't you solve this inconvenience with small free functions? ie: vector<shared_ptr<int> > v; push_back_new(v, new int(8)); for_each(indirect_begin(v), indirect_end(v), cout << _1); Bruno Martinez