A side note... in the late '80s, Bell Labs had a project to design an set of extensions to C for tasking intrinsics. The resulting language was called "Concurrent C". The term they used in Concurrent C for a task was: "task". The tasking model in Concurrent C was quite like that of Ada. The language was designed by Narain Gehani, who is very Ada-literate and has written a number of textbooks on concurrent programming (including a recent Java-oriented one). Concurrent C had an Ada-like synchronous rendezvous concept. They enlarged upon this by adding an asynchronous variant. Bell subsequently merged the Concurrent C stuff with C++ to create "Concurrent C++", but unlike C++, Concurrent C never achieved critical mass. If it had, then maybe "task" would have become the commonly-known term instead of "thread"! -- Mark Lundquist Senior Software Engineer Rational Software Development Solutions Business Unit UNIX Suites Group Aloha, OR, USA