Why shared_ptr has an explicit constructor

Question

I was wondering why shared_ptr doesn\'t have an implicit constructor. The fact it doesn\'t is alluded to here: Getting a boost::shared_ptr for this

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Answer 1

Long time lurker, and a 3rd year soft eng student here, Haphazard guess would be, to stop you from attempting to convert a 'natural' pointer to a shared_ptr, then deallocing the pointed object, without the shared_ptr knowing about the dealloc.

(Also, reference counting problems blah blah).