On: Why should I use a pointer rather than the object ...

[srean]

Not disagreeing, you missed the "typically". Well, I find manual memory management to be rarely a problem, but when it is ...

EDIT: @detrino Ah! our typical sets are different then. How about "destructor dependent cleanup", call what we may, thats the underlying mechanism, but its too limiting.

[detrino → srean]

That's not typically what people mean when they talk about RAII, you are still wrong. Every collection in the standard library is an RAII class.

[detrino → srean]

Why do you find it limiting ?