With apologies for prolonging a tangential topic, I'd like to sharpen anti-ifdef comments that have been posted already. 1. An ifdef for portability is an admission of nonportability. What it does is point out a nonportability--a useful crutch for maintainers, but a crutch nonetheless. 2. Ifdefs violate program structure. All ifdefs appear at top level. Yet, save for those that control top-level declarations, they embody conditionals at inner levels of structure. Doug McIlroy