Rationale:

The standard is clear as written; this is a request for change, not a defect in the strict sense. The LWG had several different objections to the proposed change. One is that it would prevent users from creating objects of type unary_function and binary_function. Doing so can sometimes be legitimate, if users want to pass temporaries as traits or tag types in generic code.

Proposed resolution:

When a base class in the standard library is useful only as an interface specifier, i.e., when an object of the class will never be directly instantiated, specify that the class contains a protected destructor. This will prevent deletion through a pointer to the base class without performance, or space penalties (on any implementation I'm aware of).

As an example, replace...

    template <class Arg, class Result>
    struct unary_function {
            typedef Arg    argument_type;
            typedef Result result_type;
    };

... with...

    template <class Arg, class Result>
    struct unary_function {
            typedef Arg    argument_type;
            typedef Result result_type;
    protected:
            ~unary_function() {}
    };

Affected definitions:
 20.3.1 [lib.function.objects] -- unary_function, binary_function
 24.3.2 [lib.iterator.basic] -- iterator

According to the November 1997 Draft Standard, the results of deleting an object of a derived class through a pointer to an object of its base class are undefined if the base class has a non-virtual destructor. Therefore, it is potentially dangerous to publicly inherit from such base classes.

Defect:
The STL design encourages users to publicly inherit from a number of classes which do nothing but specify interfaces, and which contain non-virtual destructors.

Attribution:
Wil Evers and William E. Kempf suggested this modification for functional objects.