Well, my last embedded project was a remote control for some specialty plasma monitors. The language used in the remotes uses exclusively strings for control. As I said before in another post, strings are a fact of life, get over it. Just as numbers, and variables, strings are used in everyday life and becoming more and more necessary for any kind of efficient programming. Rediculious little FOR...NEXT loops to parse out a string character by character are S T U P I D and a waste of time. IMO. Words are a fact of life. Adjust.