Who said that "reporting" is the most important word..could "extraction" be as or more important? I know that I'd much rather use perl to "extract" from data than use C's standard string library. On the ideology of: input, munge, output...isn't that what just about every useful CPU instruction does? So perhaps "practical" is the most important word!? Which language is best for what? 2 schools of students: those that see useful things and apply them to make their work easier and/or more fun, and those that bag every language they will never bother to study cos they're stuck coding in x language for the rest of their life. I would like to think that I'm in the first school of students, having recently been learning tcl/tk and perl. I will still use a bash or shell command instead of or inside of a perl script if it fits faster (coding wise) problem resolution. Chris