I'm a bit confused. I'm working with blitz++. It has template<typename T, int N> class Array ... which already has a begin(), end(), but I can't use them. I'm specializing boost::begin,end,etc to hide them (I don't want to modify the blitz Array class) If I specialize range_begin: namespace boost { template<typename T, int N> inline typename blitz::array_iterator< blitz::Array<T,N> >::type range_begin (blitz::Array<T,N> & a) { return blitz::range_begin (a); } } Then this doesn't work, it seems that boost::begin (blitz::Array<T,N>&) finds the original begin(), but if I do: namespace boost { template<typename T, int N> inline typename blitz::array_iterator< blitz::Array<T,N> >::type begin (blitz::Array<T,N> & a) { return blitz::range_begin (a); } } it works as desired. My questions are: 1) Is this reasonable? 2) What is the advantage of using e.g., range_begin() instead of just specializing boost::begin()?