When inheriting from an STL container the constructors and local typedefs need to be redeclared. For instance the vector contract class at http://www.ootl.org/pwc/pwc_vector.hpp.htm . It seems to me that it would be very useful to have a single macro for each of the different STL containers to ease inheritance of them. Does Boost already have something like that? If not would anyone else want something like this for Boost? Or am I really missing something basic here, and this is a bad idea for some obscure C++ reason? i.e. #define BOOST_STL_VECTOR_OVERRIDE(NAME, ELEMENT) /* */ \ typedef std::vector<ELEMENT> inherited; \ typedef typename inherited::size_type size_type; \ typedef typename inherited::reference reference; \ typedef typename inherited::iterator iterator; \ typedef typename inherited::const_iterator const_iterator; \ typedef typename inherited::reverse_iterator reverse_iterator; \ typedef typename inherited::const_reverse_iterator const_reverse_iterator; \ NAME() { } \ NAME(size_type n) : inherited(n) { } \ NAME(size_type n, const ELEMENT& t) : inherited(n, t) { } \ NAME(const NAME& x) : inherited(x) { } \ NAME(const inherited& x) : inherited(x) { } \ template <class InputIterator> \ NAME(InputIterator x0, InputIterator x1) : inherited(x0, x1) { } \ /* */ Christopher Diggins Object Oriented Template Library (OOTL) http://www.ootl.org