Thanks for the responses. After reading the comments from the community, I believe that implementing the pointer plus bits as a pointer abstraction is not the right call, because what is actually being stored is multiple things (in this case a pointer and some extra bits). I will be implementing the "pointer plus bits" as part of the bitfield_tuple's interface, which will look similar to template interface talked about by Scott McMurray. As talked about by Stefan Strasser, the packing and storage of extra bits is not limited to only pointers, I'll be extending the bitfield_tuple to support policies which the user can provide to further extend the packing and unpacking of different types of data to meet the users needs. -- thanks, Brian Bartman