Eeek! I don't want to sound rude, but that is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. One of the big advantages of using Perl is that it is cross-platform. If I feel like developing a script to read from Oracle, I can write and test it on my Windows machine first, and then move it to UNIX when I really want it to run. And the UNIX I use depends on the project I'm woking on. With Perl, I depend on the fact that what runs on one platform will work on another. An idea like this would turn Perl into the next VB.