Thanks for the nice info. I'm going to give it another try then... When I said I don't want to learn Emacs, I meant not learning its LISP architecture with the goal of creating my own custom Emacs... OT: The reasons I'm looking at Haskell are: - the object oriented approach failed for me when working on large projects in medium to large teams. OO works reasonably if you have a good design and follow some rules, but no language enforces those rules (yet), so aliasing and unwanted side effects leak all over and you spend a lot of time debugging. - I noticed I was using the "immutable" pattern a lot for solving problems lately... So I got steered automatically towards the FP world, which is immutable by definition. That is, excluding the IO "world" I guess, but as far as I understand, monadic IO is also pure, in the sense it has no aliasing, unless using unsafePerformIO. But since I'm a Haskell newbie, I'm not going to claim I understand monads! ;-) - After 20 years of hitting keyboards like a madman to reach yet another crazy deadline, I got myself RSI in both arms (Workrave helps, but it's too late :\) So I want to spend more time thinking than typing, and I certainly don't want to type boiler plate code. But most OO languages are FULL of boiler plate code, and are much more verbose than Haskell. - A last but not least, if all goes well, I will be teaching an undergrad "applied mathematics for videogame development" course. This will be very basic and practical mathematics. These students love games, so I want to let then *play* with the math using a "mathematical" programming language. If the school approves it (which is unlikely because the students will also be learning C++ => confusing), this will most likely be very basic Haskell. Being an old school C/C++ developer, I would find it unfortunate that the students don't get to see some FP, because I believe FP can play an important part in the future of videogame and even business software development (even the "giants" in my industry seem to believe that in some degree: see e.g. http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/archive/2007/01/26/anders-hejlsberg-on-linq-an d-functional-programming.aspx and http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf) So, if I decide to use Haskell, I want my students to get playing right away using a nice IDE, because the young videogame generation is even more spoiled and impatient than I am :) Peter V No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.472 / Virus Database: 269.9.0/852 - Release Date: 17/06/2007 08:23