> I'm curious about what alternatives have been suggested over time, > for this general problem of "array like" access. The necessary concatenations are much easier to write, and more easily readable, using XyWrite 4's upgrade to XPL -- principally because you can quote strings in the concatenations without first having to save them to Save/Gets. But the SAVENNN.PM I posted just now is meant to be fully compatible with v3.57. (I rarely write XPL for Xy3, so the code may not be perfect.) Yes, XyWrite is getting old, but I still use it daily and believe many subscribers to this list do so as well. It's certainly still "the greatest" in my book! Carl -- Carl Distefano cld@xxxxxxxxxx