Forgive me if this topic has been discussed before - searching for "casts" and the like in the archives bring out quite a lot of results :) Although numeric_cast allows you to safely cast between numeric types, I find that it can sometimes come in handy to just receive the saturated value in the case of an overflow. A simplified solution would look something like this: template<class Source, class Target> inline Target saturated_cast(Source val) { BOOST_STATIC_ASSERT(std::numeric_limits<Target>::is_specialized); if(val < (std::numeric_limits<Target>::min)()) return (std::numeric_limits<Target>::min)(); if(val > (std::numeric_limits<Target>::max)()) return (std::numeric_limits<Target>::max)(); return static_cast<Target>(val); } I think that this would fit nicely into cast.hpp. Any comments? Kristian Dupont