I like your acidic tone. It makes me think better. What you describe as the reference counter is most certainly the garbage collector. I've done the reading, I know that. Yes, MacOS is currently oen the few OSs whose memory manager actually decides whether to purge, move, allocate memory and return RAM to the system. Nifty huh? I actually don't care about the benchmarks either. Perl is one the faster interpreted languages and...cliche, cliche, cliche. oh well. im bored with this commentary, i don't actually see what we're arguing about. By the way, if you consider a "real world discovery after the fact" then most of the program will need to be rewritten, not just a return statement. oh well. that's all i have to say. thanx for the info on your program.