On a slightly common note, but probably more off subject, when I first started with the Governemnt back in 1988, all of our reports were written in Pro*FORTRAN. What a nightmare that was, especially on a HP-UX machine and having to recompile everything whenever Oracle or HP came out with new versions (or library patches). Pro*FORTRAN was chosen because the reporting requirements (layout, computations, multiple tables in the same report, looping, etc.) couldn't be handled by SQL*Plus. At least now I've finally got them all re-written in PL/SQL packages. -- -- Bill Ferguson -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l