To risk getting caught up in semantics... First, in defense of Perl: "Real" programming languages as opposed to "toy" languages tend to display features including 1. Object oriented capabilities 2. The ability to reference any structure 3. eval Last time I checked Perl had all of these, so it must be a "Real" language. Of course, he may be refering to the fact that Java has a stricter OO structure, but then again, is it really necessary to make *everything* an object. Not that Java is a bad language. It's very well constructed. But it seems that Mr. Swaine has fallen prey to the same "my language is better than yours" attitude that so many people exhibit these days. It's sad people have to be "Java" or "C" or "Perl" programmers instead of just plain programmers. -osorronophris