It doesn't seem so difficult for the stl designers to implement : Assuming that << is defined for T, << for a container could just iterate through the elements and print them using ofstream << .

Of course it is not hard for them. However, ask yourself: Does the format of the output make sense for every client? The standard library is about reuse and genericity. Coupling containers with some arbitrary output formatting rules makes them less generic for the sake of only some.

The recommended solution therefore is to provide your own operator<<(std::ostream &, T) and/or to take other generic algorithms, as found in e.g. <algorithms>.

The easiest eay to dump a container is probably just using std::copy(). For example I typically use something like this:

template <typename C>
std::string format(C const& c) {
    std::ostringstream out;
    out << "[";
    if (!c.empty()) {
        std::copy(c.begin(), --c.end(),
            std::ostream_iterator<typename C::value_type>(out, ", "));
            out << c.back();
    }
    out << "]";
    return out.str();
}

Yes, this doesn't always work but works for my needs. This actually shows one of the problems why there is no output for containers in the standard library: there are many different ways how containers can be formatted. To make matters worse, the formatted output should be readable where thing become real fun. All of this is doable but I'm not aware of a corresponding proposal.

Probably the easiest way to output an STL container is

std::copy(cont.begin(), cont.end(),
          std::ostream_iterator<Type>(std::cout, " "));

where Type is the type of the elements of cont (e.g. if cont is of type std::vector<int> then Type must be int).

Of course instead of std::cout you can use any ostream.

In C++11 you can use range-based for:

for (auto& i: container)  cout << i << "  ";
cout << endl;