advantage of strong typing? My guess is no--it would be a Herculean task likely to introduce more bugs than it would fix. How Unix didn't get written in C++: When Bjarne Stroustrup joined Bell Labs, he hoped to write an operating system, but he wanted to do it in an object oriented language, so he took a small detour to make an object-oriented sibling of C. That turned out to be a maelstrom from which he never escaped. Doug