I didn't see your response, souldog, as I was busily typing mine, but I hope some of the issues have been answered. The main point which applies to your questions is that the system's way of mapping virtual addresses to physical addresses does not add any complexity issues directly involved with the distinction between vectors and lists. The only thing that is affected is the order of complexity of dereference, which does not vary according to any of the dimensions of the algorithms. It is a system environment dependent order of complexity, which can be abstracted out into the basic notion of a "dereference operation" when such is not under direct control. A vector iterator move still has far fewer dereference ops than a list iterator move, insertion still requires only two memory locations being changed (dereference-assigned) on a list, whereas a vector still requires all elements subsequent to the insert to be changed and possibly those prior when a new buffer must be allocated, etc. In other words, all of the generic algorithmics and complexity guarantees are not altered. Which is what explains the real, cold, hard timing calculations that demonstrate this.

However, I doubt that you needed to hear any of this from me, so I'll let the other side explain the point they are trying to make.