Hi, I don't see much activity on this mailing list, so perhaps I am talking to myself. Perhaps I can stimulate a debate: Programming standards have deteriorated significantly. My argument: Some years ago academics developed design systems (Jordan etc) to stop young programmers writing spaghetti code (with lots of 'goto' statements). Then Knuth developed PASCAL to force young programmers to write properly structured code (goto statement not included). Well, nobody could get a job if they hadn't done one of these 'design' courses and didn't know PASCAL. Turns out that we old guys (especially FORTRAN scientific types) had been writing structured code for years, and we controlled our goto statements. And 'they' had to add a goto to PASCAL (we grinned) because without it the code can become very inefficient (especially with PUSH/POP overheads). Now the latest is "Object Oriented" (shouldn't that actually be orientated?) code with lots of over-heads. I know: there's plenty of cpu power and plenty of memory now. So now we are forced to buy hundreds of MB of RAM because so many young programmers say "there's plenty of memory". Nothing runs in 4 MB any more - too much over-head. While scientists write A(1) = ... A(2) = ... A(3) = ... to cut out a nano-second or two, the new generation are writing functions (let alone for loops) to do the same thing. And then there are the programs which ask dumb questions.... And the ones which send out demands for payments of $0.00 And the ones which start with annoying default behaviour and the damned switch is buried deep in the menus under font colour. et cetera Now I ask you, why does a modern O.S. take so long to start up? My PC runs 64 bit at 3200 MHz and it takes longer to start than my car. I know: it is preparing the 42,000 fonts that I will never use! (Don't bother with "M$ takes longer - everybody knows that.) My latest bitch is Updates. I just wanted to read the new document on rpms. But of course it couldn't be written in ACSII: it had to be written in the latest, smartest version of Adobe (you know, the one with the proprietary lock). That means that we all have to upgrade Adobe reader. My reader is only a couple of months old. That's easy, you young blokes say. But the read SLE mailing list and see what trouble it has caused me! It has cost me hours of messing around and left my system stuffed. Now I will never get to read the document (nor anything else). Anyway, why use Adobe - it takes five times as long to open a document than anything else I've seen, and the reader has no control - half the internet sites don't even let you copy it. And they keep changing it so that everybody MUST upgrade. And anyway, although it is massive, it is only a cheap version of Tex. So you young guys, start writing faster/smarter code and forget the fancy, 'full of options', 42000 font code. Colin