Hi, I was working in embedded development, writing lots of C code. My primary tool for debugging things was turning an LED on or off. So, I became quite interested in figuring out how to write code with less bugs. After some searching, I found lclint, (now knows as splint: http://lclint.cs.virginia.edu/). lclint performs static analysis on C code to find things like uninitialized variables, memory leaks, and tons of other stuff. In order to get the most out of it, I had to annotate my code like this: extern char *gname; extern /*@truenull@*/ isNull (/*@null@*/char *x); void setName(/*@null@*/ char *pname) { if (!isNull (pname)) { gname = pname; } } Although marking up the code was a bit tedious, the amount of errors that it caught was astounding. And, typically, my code actually worked on the first try after I fixed anything lclint complained about. I decided that this thing static error analysis stuff was pretty spiffy and set out to look for a language that had it built-in by default. I originally started with Concurrent Clean 1.x, but eventually settled on Haskell (GHC 5.04) for reasons I do not remember. I think it may have been because Haskell seemed to have a bigger, more active community (which is still true today). j.