Next question: any way to call a function specified as a string? gshow( somefunction ) produces gshow on the output of the function, rather than on the function itself, so not got very far so far. For background, the idea is to be able to serialize a function call to something we can pass over the network ,deserialize on the other end, and process appropriately. One could presumably do this using a generator of some sort. Is this the only option? I can live with using a generator for this; it's the usual way most implementations of this kind of thing work (ICE, WCF, ...); but if we can avoid using a generator, *** and stay strongly typed ***, it's better. For example, in traditional imperative languages, we'd specify an interface - so ensuring we are strongly typed - and then we are free to implement a serialization/deserialization scheme of our choice.