I wouldn't be sure of that; I would tend to think that nested functions were left out simply because they add complexity, and didn't add enough value to outweigh that complexity. (In ~40 years of programming in C, I have never missed them.) C seems (well, until the standards committees got ahold of it) to have added things as a demonstrated need was felt for them (see DMR's evolution of C paper), and maybe they just never found a need for nested function definitions? I suspect that Ken probably knows; he's not (AFAIK) on the Unix History list (TUHS), but several of his early co-workers (including Stephen Johnson, who did PCC) are, and could relay a question to him, if it were asked over there (if we really want to know). Noel