That's what BOOST_HAS_LONG_LONG and BOOST_HAS_MS_INT64 are for - see is_integer for an example of use:
template <class T> is_integral{...};
template<> is_integral<unsigned char>{...}; // etc #ifdef BOOST_HAS_LONG_LONG template<> is_integral<long long>{...}; template<> is_integral<unsigned long long>{...}; #elif defined(BOOST_HAS_MS_INT64) template<> is_integral<__int64>{...}; template<> is_integral<unsigned __int64>{...}; #endif
Note these macros should only be used when overloading/specialising for all intrinsic types, such usage should probably be infequent IMO.
I forgot to say: this use case is potentially more complex still: 1) It's only a matter of time before we see 128-bit integer types (assuming that their not here already), these will not necessarily be spelled "long long". 2) For platforms where sizeof(int) == 8 then one of int32_t or int16_t will be type "short", and the other will be some vendor specific type (I believe this is already the case on some Cray systems, but don't have the details, and we don't have a macro for this either... yet!). I've seen someone half jokingly suggest "short short" for the name of this type :-) 3) There are two compilers (MSVC6 and compatible Intel versions), where __int8, __int16, __int32 are distinct types from the standard and same sized integral types (short, int etc). Fortunately MS fixed that one with VC7. In other words overloading/specialising on all intrinsic integer types is complex and in general the full case needs vendor specific code, sorry :-( John.