After attending Pai Chou's wonderful presentation, "Algorithm Education in Python" at Python10, I got permission from the instructor of an algorithms course I am currently taking to do our programming assignments in Python (after first assuring him that they would not be difficult to read ;-) Our first assignment is to implement merge and heap sort and then to compare them empirically as to the number of assignments and comparisons made by each. I've written the sorts. Does anyone have any suggestions as to the best way to do the empirical analysis? Is there a better way than just creating counters and then littering my code with increment statements? Please let me know if you have any ideas? Thanks! jeff elkner yorktown high school arlington, va