BAW> Oh, I agree -- I wasn't going to add the configure flag anyway :) BAW> What I meant was how much of my changes should be ifdef-out-able? BAW> Just the methods on string objects? All my changes? Well, when the CPP macro is undefined, the behavior from Python should be unchanged, yes? Am I missing something? There are string methods and what else involved in the changes? If string.py has to test to see if "".capitalize yields an AttributeError to decide what to do, I think that sort of change will be simple enough to accommodate. Any new code that gets well-exercised now before string methods become widely available is all to the good in my opinion. It's not fixing something that ain't broke, more like laying the groundwork for new directions. Skip