Vector iterator not dereferencable

Question

I have an abstract base class called Shape from which both Circle and Rectangle are derived, but when I execute the following code in VS 2005 I get the error Debug assertion

Answer 1

Simple :

• find fails since your newly created Circle can't be found in the vector with comparing Shape *
• a failed find returns the end iterator which is not deferencable as caught by a Debug assertion

For it to work like you want, you do need to compare Shape, not Shape*

As pointed out in other answers, boost::ptr_vector is an easy way to achieve this.