the various integral types have gotten quite confusing. stephen and i have had a discussion about this [it was open, but no one else seemed interested in participating], and reached some consensus. now is a good time to make global changes, since few people are working on the code. so, i'm planning on making the following changes in a few days, all of which involve renaming an integral type: [counts/indices, 0 based] Charcount -> Charcount Extcount, Memory_Count, Lstream_Data_Count, Bytecount -> Bytecount Element_Count -> Elemcount [buffer positions, 1 based] Bufpos -> Charbufpos Bytind -> Bytebufpos Memind -> Membufpos [hash codes, unsigned long] Hash_Code -> Hashcode [characters referring to text] Bufbyte -> Intbyte Extbyte -> Extbyte this should make much clearer the semantics of the various types, and which are related to which. ben