I have often wondered if we didn't lose something when the first programming people learn to do is no longer batch processing -- the sort I learned to do with cards. At any rate, I keep meeting people who have severe problems understanding how to write programs that do not interact with a user at all. They keep wanting to have 'conversations' with an assumed 'program operator' ... It is a fundamental conceptual problem, for some of them. The notion that somebody could want to 'get data from here' without clicking on a mouse for a filename at all stops some people cold, even though they have already had 1 or 2 introductory progamming courses. For them, the _GUI_ is the computer, and the computer is relentlessly interactive... Laura