On Fri, 24 Nov 2000 08:54:43 +0100, Roland Giersig wrote: >Maybe the title should be : > >"Perl should use XML as its basic data type instead of linear strings" Horrible. I kinda liked your original proposal. But you should NOT focus on XML. That leaves out too many other possible data sources: RTF, for example, or TeX. What is typical, is that it is marked up text, in the form of a tree, i.e. properly nested. The internal structure might as well be easily representable as XML. I do think that the term "non-linear text" is absolutely unclear. -- Bart.