Yeah, but the problem is that there will always be those old versions of Perl installed somewhere, and even if 5.9 fixes it, all those obsolete 5.8 installs will linger around for years...... keeping the superstitions alive. So if you plan to distribute the scripts to unknown platforms and Perl versions, it may behoove programmers to play it safe, and try to reuse threads, which does work on 5.8. (At least for a few years).