First, I'd like to thank everyone who contributed to this wonderful library. We use Boost at work, and I'd like to contribute back. I've come up with a portable mechanism that allows the declaration of bitfields much like the way you do in C++. The syntax for using these bitfields is the same as that of C++ bitfields. My solution doesn't suffer from the ambiguity in C++ where you don't know whether the first bitfield starts at the most significant or least significant end of the word. It also doesn't suffer from the problem in C++ bitfields where the compiler can arbitrarily decide to align bitfields along word boundaries. This solution has been very useful to me when dealing with hardware registers and with 16-bit color formats. I am aware of the existance of std::bitset, but it doesn't handle groups of bits like bitfields do. If there's interest, I'll post some code here. Emile Cormier -- Emile Cormier emilecormier@mailcan.com