Quoth John Goerzen : | Uh... yes. Opening and closing files, command-line parsing, etc -- | needed by almost every program. Aside from some very simple | stdin-to-stdout filters, it is difficult to imagine a program where | you don't need to open a file! That's how it seems to me, too, and moreover maybe the most generally recognizable API. With a GUI or a database, you're going to need to present a fair amount of background to just about everyone, but files, command lines etc. are common to nearly every programming language. If the virtues of Haskell can't be presented in this context, then maybe it isn't such a generally useful language that people ought to be worried about learning it. Donn Cave, donn@avvanta.com