No idea. :-)
Me neither, it's rather complicated to follow lambda inner workings.
I see... then a get_pointer overload won't work either, since you can't return a raw pointer from it, and shared_ptr doesn't define operator->*. If you can't cache the shared_ptr locally in aux, the only remaining option is two nested binds.
I'm almost giving up. To sum up what we've got so far, I've written this code // To mimic c++0x auto type (with help of g++'s typeof) #define auto(var, def) typeof(def) var = def struct aux { aux() : b(1) {} int a() const { return 5; } int b; }; int main() { aux a; // This compiles and executes as expected, we're dealing with a pointer to an attribute. boost::function<int(const aux &)> fa = &_1->*&aux::b; int ia = fa(a); cout << ia << endl; // This works, but it's not the way we want, we're dealing with a pointer to a member function. auto(fm1, &_1->*&aux::a); int im1 = fm1(a)(); cout << im1 << endl; // This 'should' work, but doesn't compile. auto(fm2, &protect(_1)->*&aux::a); int im2 = fm2()(a); cout << im2 << endl; return 0; } I think that protect could be used to swap the order of functor instantiations, but it doesn't work. I hope Jaakko Järvi drops by and gives some advice. Thank you very much for your help, Rodolfo Lima.