the stl has standard functors for all operators, like less, greater, equal_to etc.

I find myself needing to reference or dereference objects quite often, and I would have liked functors to operator& and operator*.

While I know I could just write them, I was wondering why they weren't part of the stl.

Is it just because "I guess they forgot", or is there something so dangerous about them, they decided to not put them in? Or something else?

Thoughts?