Greetings, Thanks for all the comments and ideas: Dave Gomboc suggests: nybbles<0011,1010,1100,0100>::value David Abrahams and Jeff Flinn noted that 'nibbles' is the common spelling they have seen. And, personally, I've always seen a 4-bit entity written as nibble. So possible syntaxes for the template based solution, in the order they have been suggested, might be: binary_int<0011,1010,1100,0100>::value bits<0011,1010,1100,0100>::value nybbles<0011,1010,1100,0100>::value nibbles<0011,1010,1100,0100>::value On a different note, Matt Calabrese lofted a preprocessor-based library: BOOST_BINARY_LITERAL( 101 0111 1010 0110 ) This looks way cool. I personally like the way the '::value' is not required. So, how does the boost community decide which of the proposals (template-based or preprocessor-based) to pursue? Thanks for your consideration. Scott Schurr