This would be fine today, but if we added a new table before 85 then it would become"83-86", but we might not want the new table included in the range. The current markup would still be correct in that case, referring to the individual tables and not including the new one.

I don't know if that concern is important. It's possible that even if we did add a new table we'd want it in the range.

Yeah, I don't know either. I started with just adding a comma after "and 85", but then I got inspired by 17.5.3.1p1, which has "Tables 20-27". :)

The cleveref package handles these situations nicely:

\usepackage{cleveref}

In \Cref{tab:containers.container.requirements,tab:containers.reversible.requirements,tab:containers.optional.operations}
\tcode{X} denotes a container class containing objects of type...

is typeset as:

In Tables 83–85 X denotes a container class containing objects of type...

cleveref sorts and compresses the references by default. It's smart enough to only compress it into a range (e.g., 83–85) when it is contiguous.

Well that's rather clever :)

Sounds nifty. But would that be an acceptable dependency?

I'm not wild about this change, I think the status quo is fine. @jwakely, @zygoloid, do you feel strongly either way?

Nope, I'm neutral.