at first i thought that the boost library came with it's own implementation of a c preprocessor, as i thought that was the only way it could be doing all that iteration (multiple "patterned" declarations, etc, etc) and the c standard hasn't introduced a notion of counters... i've considered concatenation, but that incurs a "final" string to be compared which cannot be generated automatically a priori (correct me if i'm mistaken). but when i looked at boost thoroughly, it seems to be doing everything in standard. so can anybody tell me how that is done?