I believe even with C++98 you could have used boost::shared_ptr and boost::scoped_ptr. The addition to the STL effectively didn't change that much. It's just th

I believe even with C++98 you could have used boost::shared_ptr and boost::scoped_ptr. The addition to the STL effectively didn't change that much. It's just that when you used C++ back then, they probably weren't considered best practice yet. More important in my opinion are changes to the language, like lambdas or auto.