>I am not sure I do like the use of ~ here. It does not screan concatenate to me (but then again neither did . when I started perl) >I am thinking that maybe it should be a 2 character operator with at least one of then being + as + is common in many other languages for doing concatenation. How about $a cat $b? That keeps the theme of strings using words and numbers using symbols--like eq vs. ==. --Brent Dax