Hi, in the thread about C# like properties we were talking about the advantage to be able to repere assignation to properties. I said that, another way to repare the assignments is to use a free function assign_to, like we use the free function swap, or the cast family functions. assign_to(a.p_X, 1); assign_to call by default the assignment operator. If we want transitive assignation a = b = c; we could do assign_to(a, assign_to(b, c)); and if we find this not really readable we can try with tie(a) = tie(b) = c; tie is a template function returning an ca_wrapper. template <typename T> ca_wrapper <T> tie(T& r) { return ca_wrapper<T>(r); } ca_wrapper is responsable to transforming the assignation and operator conversion on a call to assign_to and no more. template <typename T> class ca_wrapper { T& ref_; public: ca_wrapper(T& r) : ref_(r) {} template <typename U> T& operator =(U const& u) { return assign_to(ref_, u); } template <typename U> operator U() { return convert_to(ref_, u); } }; The advantage of having a specific function is that we can specialize the assign_to function for unrelated classes. The Boost.Conversion library (on the review schedule) defines two free functions convert_to and assign_to which by default use the conversion operator and the assignment. We can see convert_to as a getter and assign_to as a setter. The major advantage is that with a uniform syntax, the user can however specialize them to do conversion and assignations between unrelated types. I don't know if tie is a good name to manage with assignation of a variable, I have taken the name from the Boost.Tuple? Regards, _____________________ Vicente Juan Botet Escribá P.S. tie and ca_wrapper are new features of Boost.Conversion v.0.3