I think the possibility of MFC being dropped is very low at the moment.

At any rate, thanks for your comments.

I knew this issue wasn't going to be resolved, but as far as I know no discussion such as this has ever taken place on code guru and I thought it should.

Yes, portability of code is one reason why you would use STL but my point is that if you're not going to port code to other platforms (e.g. UNIX) is there any reason to use it in a windows app ?

I actually know both the STL and MFC very, very well having used both for a large number of years and prefer MFC.

Inheritance, in my opinion, is one of the greatest advantages of C++ and to completely disallow it in such a widespread toolkit as STL is terrible.

I'm sure a lot more is going to get added to this thread and I will respond, but only to new arguments. I think we've covered all the 'surface' issues already.

Many thanks for the interest. It has been a great deal of fun arguing my point with you....

Darwen.