"Sebastian Redl" <sebastian.redl@getdesigned.at> wrote in message news:44463E63.6030703@getdesigned.at... : Marcin Kalicinski wrote: : : >Agreed. I thought about it before, and came to a conclusion that the best : >way to implement it is to use preprocessor constant to allow user specify : >default separator, e.g. BOOST_PROPERTY_TREE_SEPARATOR. : > : > : I disagree. I think this should be a runtime per-tree setting, not : something set at compile time. I also think it would be quite trivial to do. Why do you care to have this as a per-tree setting ??? So now, say that someone writes a library function to read a ptree into a struct EmployeeInfo. Unless this function explicitly specifies the separator at every call, it will fail if you pass it a tree that is configured to use a different separator ? I'd much rather have a universal default ( . or / ), guaranteed, that I can use in all my "item paths". And maybe, if there is a reason to think that it will be useful, the ability to specify a custom separator for a call. But what is the point? Ivan -- http://ivan.vecerina.com/contact/?subject=NG_POST <- email contact form