Carl wrote:ITER is surpassing cool. Yes, XS is 1/3 faster. And easier for me to program, too.XS is slightly faster in my tests -- by less than one-thousandth of a second on my ancient Pentium 200. Time it for yourself. After decoding, DeFine each example, (A) and (B), below, then issue ITER 1000to time 1000 iterations. Do this several times and average the durations, then take the difference between the two averages. Divide by 1000 to get the difference for a single iteration. Thanks, Harry Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx