Iterator stability means iterators that point into a container are not invalidated by operations (such as insertions or deletions) on that container. Address s

Iterator stability means iterators that point into a container are not invalidated by operations (such as insertions or deletions) on that container. Address stability means that addresses of elements are not changed by container operations. If you think about it, you can see that maintaining this property rules out contiguous storage of any subset of a container's elements, hence my comment about "compact representations".