I recently discovered that my singleton could potentially be used in a way other than as a base class. For example, to create and use a singleton instance of a class which could have other ordinary instances as well, one could just do: class Example { public: void foo ( ) { } }; // elsewhere... singleton < Example >::pointer ptr; ptr->foo ( ); In addition, one could make a singleton who's instance refers to another class by deriving from a singleton of that type, as follows (using the Example above): class ExampleSingleton : public singleton < Example > { private: ExampleSingleton ( ); ~ ExampleSingleton ( ); }; which would essentially create a shorter name for singleton < Example >. I need opinions: should this type of usage be allowed, or should I find some way to make it fail to compile? If allowed, should it be encouraged and/or documented? -Jason