Joshua> On the other side of things, it seems this could be introduced Joshua> into the language without making 'has' a keyword--no syntactic Joshua> rules currently use concatenation. This is a good point. I sometimes use this sort of construct: has = {"foo":1, "bar":1, ...}.has_key ... if has(a): ... -- Skip Montanaro (skip at pobox.com) (847)971-7098