I've been working on Yuval's suggestion of (little|big|native)_endian wrappers, but ran into a problem. On fundamental types, the wrapper works fine, and Beman's integer_cover_operators made it easy to add support for integer operations. ( However, why does integer_cover_operators use operators<T> and not operators2<T,IntegerType> ? I needed to change that to solve an ambiguity error. ) The problem comes when wrapping my (newly reimplemented) exact type. In that case, deriving the wrapper from integer_cover_operators adds 1 byte : sizeof( long ) = 0x4 sizeof( boost::big_endian< long > ) = 0x4 sizeof( boost::exact<24> ) = 0x3 sizeof( boost::big_endian< boost::exact<24> > ) = 0x4 I could just have a get member function in the wrappers, but that loses much of the elegance. Any suggestions for solving this? ~ Scott McMurray P.S. exact came out quite nicely, imho: CHAR_BIT*sizeof( boost::exact<24>[2] ) = 48 CHAR_BIT*sizeof( boost::exact<24,signed,16>[2] ) = 64 CHAR_BIT*sizeof( boost::exact<32,unsigned>[2] ) = 64 CHAR_BIT*sizeof( boost::exact<8,unsigned,16>[2] ) = 32 ( std::numeric_limits< boost::exact<24> >::min() ) = -8388608 ( std::numeric_limits< boost::exact<24> >::min()-1 ) = 8388607 ( std::numeric_limits< boost::exact<24> >::max() ) = 8388607 ( std::numeric_limits< boost::exact<24> >::max()+1 ) = -8388608 ( std::numeric_limits< boost::exact<24,unsigned> >::min() ) = 0 ( std::numeric_limits< boost::exact<24,unsigned> >::max() ) = 16777215