Hi John, Thank you for the time you took to review the library. Although your vote is no, you presented an interesting alternative to current syntax, and also to other proposed syntaxes. I was unaware of the potential that operator [] had in the context of ptree when coupled with overloaded, templated conversion operator and "ghost nodes". Originally I dismissed it, because it was limited to one argument, and also because I'm not a great fan of overusing operator overloading. I now see it as another variant of ptree syntax revolution, besides path class proposed by Matias Capeletto and Jeff Flinn. Finally I must say that no matter what result of the review will be, the interface of ptree will change, either as a preparation for a re-review, or as maintenance of boost library. There have been too many interesting interface propositions that are vastly superior to the current thing.
I certainly wouldn't try and read (and then write back!!!) the entire windows registry, or any large part of it, with this library.
Oh no, this would kill your windows box. Ptree does not support all registry data formats, so you would inevitably lose or corrupt some data. But the point is you can safely use JSON config on Linux version of your program, and registry config on Windows, with just 2 lines of difference between codebases. Thank you, Marcin