imho the ASC thing should stay as a feature ? after all when you really think about it the ASC value of a string can only be the value of the first character anyways ... so why not just leave as is - no harm done ? kinda like converting a string to numeric, it would only read the leading digits of the a string, fe:

? VAL("123ABC")

123

[ 31. December 2002, 19:50: Message edited by: Shawn ]