Well I wouldn't say that using stl classes is a bad idea from the point of view of performanse. The thing is stl is an excelent, optimized and extremely well tested peace of work, being fast, safe and trustable, and pretty well documented, so thiis is a good reazon to you to move to using stl stuff in your code. Not only it would be easier to someone to change / understand your code, because stl is known and well documented; it would be also faster to you to develope because you don't have to code stuff that has already been coded, tested and documented and widely used. The stl classes are a c++ standard, so these same classes are very likely to be present in every c++ compiler of every platform. This can make your code easily portable. The stl is only available from c++ code though. Also, for Sina's explanation about pointers size, I think I recall Will Pearson said sometime ago that the pointer size would vary in windows and unix implementations on 64 bits platforms. Marlon -- When you say "I wrote a program that crashed Windows," people just stare at you blankly and say "Hey, I got those with the system, for free." Linus Torvalds __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind