matt hellige: > ... i think people would > be pretty frustrated if "-56.2" worked but not "-x"... Weell, the Cleaners around have to live with it. -5 works. For variables they write ~x. But "-" in front of a number is not a lexical entity, but a syntactic one, so f -5 and f (-5) are a bit different. I didn't follow this discussion, but please avoid this mess in Haskell. Jerzy Karczmarczuk