It is my understanding that the FFI foreign imports declare an ABI and not an API, meaning the exact way to make the foreign call should be completely deterministic based on just what is in the haskell file proper. Otherwise, obviously, direct to assembly implementations would be impossible. In this sense, include files are always potentially optional, however, due to the oddness of the C langauge, one cannot express certain calls without proper prototypes, current haskell implementations take the straightforward path of relying on the prototypes that are contained in the system headers, which also incidentally provides some safety net against improperly specified FFI calls. However, it would also be reasonable for an implementation to just generate its own prototypes, or use inline assembly or any other mechanism to implement the FFI ABI calls properly. I am not sure what my point is, perhaps just that it is not really a haskell-prime language issue, but new pragmas are, so perhaps this is in that regard. in any case, in jhc a {-# INCLUDE foo.h #-} pragma has the effect of adding "foo.h .." to every foreign ccall declaration in the current module. Just a handy shortcut, not that I think that behavior should be codified or anything. John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈