There is a lengthy and fairly nuanced response to the activestate/MS collaboration in a couple of the thePerlJournals (http://www.tpj.com). One is response to a rabid (if clever) letter from a MS-hater, the other is a reply from the boss at activestate as to what exactly the MS $$$$s will be doing for AS and what they will be expected to do in return. Never underestimate BG's ability to accept and subvert but perl may be the mouthful they can't swallow. Oh, and there is (though I've not used it) an amazing description of a visual (perltk) debugger, ptkdb: http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/A/AE/AEPAGE/ If half of what the article: http://www.itknowledge.com/tpj/issues/vol4_3/tpj0403-0008.html (but you probably need to get a login/passwd from tpj first) is true, it'd be a dream come true. 'course I'm more of the vi/httpd error_log sort of debugger, myself. a