Ok you got me. I was only trying to build as many boost libs as possible with the msvc-stlport toolset. The fixes were rather easy to make program_options lib build, I should have understood that the reason of those fixes not having been done before is that a buildable library is not necessarily usable. If you think that program_options is totally useless without the as<> syntax support then you can ignore my patches. Maybe a #error reporting this fact would be more obvious and would avoid to people like me to spend some time on it again. Bests