Obviously, an integer stack isn’t a crucial tool. The real need for containers comes when you start making objects on the heap using new and destroying them with delete. In the general programming problem, you don’t know how many objects you’re going to need while you’re writing the program. For example, in an air-traffic control system you don’t want to limit the number of planes your system can handle. You don’t want the program to abort just because you exceed some number. In a computer-aided design system, you’re dealing with lots of shapes, but only the user determines (at runtime) exactly how many shapes you’re going to need. Once you notice this tendency, you’ll discover lots of examples in your own programming situations.

C programmers who rely on virtual memory to handle their “memory management” often find the idea of new, delete, and container classes disturbing. Apparently, one practice in C is to create a huge global array, larger than anything the program would appear to need. This may not require much thought (or awareness of malloc( ) and free( )), but it produces programs that don’t port well and that hide subtle bugs.

In addition, if you create a huge global array of objects in C++, the constructor and destructor overhead can slow things down significantly. The C++ approach works much better: When you need an object, create it with new, and put its pointer in a container. Later on, fish it out and do something to it. This way, you create only the objects you absolutely need. And usually you don’t have all the initialization conditions available at the start-up of the program. new allows you to wait until something happens in the environment before you can actually create the object.

So in the most common situation, you’ll make a container that holds pointers to some objects of interest. You will create those objects using new and put the resulting pointer in the container (potentially upcasting it in the process), pulling it out later when you want to do something with the object. This technique produces the most flexible, general sort of program.