C++ STL: Which method of iteration over a STL container is better?

Question

This may seem frivolous to some of you, but which of the following 2 methods of iteration over a STL container is better? Why?

Answer 1

Coincidentally I made a speed test recently (filling 10 * 1024 * 1024 ints with rand() ).
These are 3 runs, time in nano-seconds

vect[i] time      : 373611869  
vec.at(i) time    : 473297793  
*it = time        : 446818590  
arr[i] time       : 390357294  
*ptr time         : 356895778  

UPDATE : added stl-algorithm std::generate, which seems to run the fastest, because of special iterator-optimizing (VC++2008). time in micro-seconds.

vect[i] time      : 393951
vec.at(i) time    : 551387
*it = time        : 596080
generate = time   : 346591
arr[i] time       : 375432
*ptr time         : 334612

Conclusion : Use standard-algorithms, they might be faster than a explicit loop ! (and also good practice)

Update : the above times were in a I/O-bound situation, I did the same tests with a CPU-bound (iterate over a relatively short vector, which should fit in cache repeatedly, multiply each element by 2 and write back to vector)

//Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition
vect[i] time      : 1356811
vec.at(i) time    : 7760148
*it = time        : 4913112
for_each = time   : 455713
arr[i] time       : 446280
*ptr time         : 429595

//GCC
vect[i] time      : 431039
vec.at(i) time    : 2421283
*it = time        : 381400
for_each = time   : 380972
arr[i] time       : 363563
*ptr time         : 365971  

Interestingly iterators and operator[] is considerably slower in VC++ compared to for_each (which seems to degrade the iterators to pointers through some template-magic for performance).
In GCC access times are only worse for at(), which is normal, because it's the only range-checked function of the tests.