yes, some globals are used, e.g. to construct the instruction words for the machine and keep track of address and lines, etc. these should not have any effect on the parsing, methinks. i've just made a reply, with some code and output samples, to revdiablo. as for startup cost, the beastie is _terribly_ slow. precompiling helps a bit, but what i'd really like to do is to get perlcc to be happy with it, but alas, that's a whole different can of worms: it has serious complaints and gives errors like "compile failed...that cannot happen!" :-/