How would I stop implicit type conversion

[kwikius]

It isn't. And I guess I'm to blame if I'm not keeping up. By the way, a
surprising large numbers of developers do not know much about boost,
and if they do it's probably shared_ptr which is making its way into
tr1 anyway.

Ok. Next time I post something that uses boost, I'll follow your
suggestion and put a link to either the Documentation for whatever I
used or boost website.

My first issue I guess was having to give up using my own smart pointer
which I had been using for about 2 years and was quite proud of. It
wasn't a particularly great smart pointer, it used intrusive reference
counting as did so many of the early ones. It had one or two other
issues too which took a big hack to get rid of but I thought I'd
improved it enough and was sad to let go.

I don't recall every really having my own string class. Not one to be
particularly fond of anyway.

I do still use my own tokeniser and string-convert functions. The
problem with the boost ones is the exceptions they throw are so useless
to me that I have to catch them and rethrow them anyway so I decided
not to bother with them.

Well, I'm no way an expert on these libraries or boost in general for
that matter. I am sure that your experiences of using, trying to use,
deciding not to use any of these libraries would be interesting to the
authors or maintainers of those libraries, especially if you have
developed your own versions, as you will have come up against the same
issues (The best place to do that of course is on one of the boost
lists). My own experience of trying to develop a library is that
feedback, positive or negative, is really essential. In fact (I don't
know the name of the paradigm but...) user led development is the best
way to develop software in general. AFAIK the people developing
libraries at boost are trying to provide libraries that are accessible
and useable by all C++ programmers (If that isnt happening then it may
be because they arent getting the feedback) so I am sure they would be
interested in what you have to say. Of course well thought out
suggestions on how things can improved are most useful.

regards
Andy Little