[eps]

Just like that old joke -

  There are two ways to wash dishes -
  after a meal or before it.

Same with data containers, there are two mindsets. Either data is primary and can be optionally organized into containers or containers are primary and they essentially own the data that's put in them. STL model is of latter and "intrusive" lists are of former. I leave it up to you to decide which one is an ass-backward approach in the name of type safety :)

[barrkel]

It depends on whether you have generic code (e.g. map, filter, sort etc.) that you want to apply to the list, vs efficiency concerns, or whether your code needs to iterate through the list from an item.

There's no one true way here. I personally find having a library of operations like map and filter more productive for most code that I write, rather than needing to specialize them per structure.