By scanning briefly through the property_tree implementation I noticed that it uses its own stream_translator<> class for string-to-other_type and vice verse conversions. The functionality seems very similar/overlapping to that of lexical_cast (and also uses streams), if this is true this part of property_tree should probably be refactored to use lexical_cast so that it gets implicitly 'fixed' when/if lexical_cast gets fixed (regarding the issues outlined in the previous relevant post). -- "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." Aldous Huxley