Thanks for the replies.

does it still give you errors if you change it to this?

WRITE 1,(in_stream[0]-32)
yes it does

DTs two comments were both required to get it working.

Do you know is this considered and error that will be fixed in future releases? It seems like you should be able to have any number of parenthesis (within reason) as it previously did in 2.47 and the extra write statement seems like a clever patch, but definitely you should never have to write code that won't be used to make other code work. It is good to know how to solve the problem. Hopefully this thread will help someone else, though I am pretty sure I have read your write one byte comment in a previous thread a long time ago and just forgot all about it until you restated it. As always thanks for the help.

David