Agree fully with you tilly. I like throwing on the parenthesis, makes it easier to read. I never understood why you would have to declare the subroutines either. In C, before the C++ days, it was so ugly to have a huge list of prototypes at the top of your source that looked exactly like the subroutine call without the block of code. Never understood it when I would think that the subroutine call itself is a great declaration.