I've just made an attempt to use the named parameters library (currently in review queue, and available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/boost/files/named_params.zip) to simply properties in BGL. Currently, to initialize all properties one has to do: edge_descriptor e = add_edge(....); put(e, g, vertex_color, 10); put(e, g, vertex_name, "foo"); I hope that with the named parameters library it will be possible to do: add_edge(v1, v2, (vertex_color = 10, vertex_name = "foo"), g); I've tried to implement this idea, but run into the problems. First issue is documentation: it gives foo_impl(foo_keywords(a0)); as example, while the code uses: return f_impl(f_keywords()(t, name_)); Which has extra '()' after f_keywords. The second problem is that I need to create a type for 'keywords' (derived from 'keywords<...>' and use it for passing arguments). The docs suggest to create a number of forwarding functions, but given that a number of vertex properties can be rather large (and is actually unbounded), this does not seem good. So, now can do: vertex_property p = prop_keywords()(color = 10, name = "foo"); but I'd rather like: vertex_property p((color = 10, name = "foo")); So, the operator, will be overloaded to create something I can index with 'tag type' and get a value. In fact, this will allow to avoid declaring 'pop_keywords' -- since again, user can declare it's own keywords so it's not clear how to define that class. The example I've played with is at: http://zigzag.cs.msu.su:7813/p.cpp Comments are appreciated. - Volodya