M'luds, There's probably a place to report this properly, but I thought if I mentioned it here, you could throw cabbages at me and tell me where to go. Exhibit A, from http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.12.2/html/libraries/random-1.0.0.2/System-Rand... "In addition, read may be used to map an arbitrary string (not necessarily one produced by show) onto a value of type StdGen. In general, the read instance of StdGen has the following properties: * It guarantees to succeed on any string." Exhibit B, from ghci Prelude System.Random> read "00-00-00-00-00-00" :: StdGen Loading package old-locale-1.0.0.2 ... linking ... done. Loading package time-1.1.4 ... linking ... done. Loading package random-1.0.0.2 ... linking ... done. *** Exception: Prelude.read: no parse The prosecution rests. Conor