A while ago I looked at Haskell. I got stuck on a problem which basically caused me to stop using Haskell. Realising that I never asked anyone else how they would approach the deal, I decided to ask before I put the final chapter on Haskell. I have a program that requires a lot of customisation. As a result there is an initialization file with many entries ( typically 30-80 entries ). Some of these entries need to be accessed quite often, so that opening the file and reading in on demand is not really an option. So the basic question is how do I handle access to these parameters? PS: I've thought of Hugh's approach to global variables, but even with compound data structures it really isn't practical for such a large number. Not even when creating compound structures to hold the data. Worse you wind up with data structures which are not coherent having only the fact that each is a customisation in common. Thaddeus L. Olczyk ----------------------- Think twice, code once.