Immutable container with mutable content

Question

The story begins with something I thought pretty simple :

I need to design a class that will use some STL containers. I need to give users of the class access to an

Answer 1

The simplest option would probably be a standard STL container of pointers, since const-ness is not propagated to the actual objects. One problem with this is that STL does not clean up any heap memory that you allocated. For that take a look at Boost Pointer Container Library or smart pointers.