R. D. Davis said: I'm still in the process of rewriting a bunch of horrible Perl code to run on my NeXT (and off-topic machines) to do a weekly batch text processing job. I would postulate that Perl, if allowed to be used without "use strict" and the -w switch, actually *could* forever ruin the mind of a potential programmer. (Much more so than BASIC ever could. Is that the number 9 or the character string "9"? Who knows? Who cares? Eek!) Even with those safeguards, the regular expressions could do some long-lasting damage. I dunno if this counts as a useful suggestion, but Mathematica's programming language can be used to write programs in any of the usual styles (procedural, functional, list-oriented, object-oriented). I don't know that I'd want to spring it on a beginner, though. I agree that a good instructor is key, no matter what "syntactical sugar" is chosen first. - Mark