I would like to point out that there were significant advances in standards compliance from GCC 3.0. This include an almost complete STL. Some of the STL is available with GCC 2.9x but it is incomplete because of unsupported language features. (It's missing important abilities.) Also some of the unsupported features are neccessary for newer generic programming techniques. And GCC 2.9x chrashes on many uses of the supported ones. Most likely it is the inablity to support a complete STL that would cause a C++ teacher to recomend a later version. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com