Oh Perl wasn't any sort of religious choice - it was just to avoid "now the way I'd do it ..." issues. Since she hasn't done any programming already at school I felt free to pick any language - and Perl provides a huge amount of power and flexibility without (very) complex syntactic effort - or at least that's how I see it, but then it's so long since I had to learn any language from the ground up what do I know. I appreciate your suggestions for first programs however, I'd forgotten the delights of such simple programming tasks.