Hi -- On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng wrote: > Hmmm. I always get tangled with these. Bracketing things doesn't help > here (I tried it). I'd have expected the or to "short circuit" after > the print succeeded..... Oh, but print returns Nil, is that it? Hmmm. > I'm thinking in Shell I suppose! Or Icon... You could make a virtue of necessity and decide that lines like this should start with ! to draw attention to themselves: error_msg = "error" error = true ! puts error_msg and exit 1 if error :-) David -- David Alan Black home: dblack / candle.superlink.net work: blackdav / shu.edu Web: http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav