Hi all, I'm amused at all this discourse on volume set naming. Likewise, I'm amused at all the hyphens used in COBOL variable names. And underscores used in all sorts of places. Like Stan's eschewing of 'SET' in volume set names, you can eschew all those hyphens and difficult_to_type underscores as well. I work in a hospital where we have a pretty well defined stratification of applications between 'administration' and 'medical'. So my volume sets are simply 'admin' and 'med'. Well, to fudge a bit, I split core medical applications into 'med1' (note, NOT med_1) and 'med2' for departmental discipline-specific stuff (now that hyphen was there for a purpose). Why do people do it? I mean things like 'birth-date' instead of 'birthdate', and ..... well, you know what I mean. Programmers are NOT generally touch-typists (I am, and at a startling 100-words-per-minute with once-measured 98.7% accuracy) .... so why make it so difficult? Just as an aside, whoever designed block-structured languages were very MOST DEFINITELY not touch typists. If you are, try to copy-type a few lines from one of them. Even my fondness for FORTRAN is taxed by the syntatic ambivalence to polydactilliness. (Touch-typists are fond of inventing words, too.) Maybe this is why I've often said COBOL is such a comfortable language ... not unlike writing letters to Mum, actually. Ah, but, he says with retrospective retractability .... the time within which a touch-typist can frame elegant COBOL syntax exactly matches the speed with which his mind can reduce a complex paradigm into a structured set of logical steps. Now, who wants to know why COBOL is still so popular? Ron (apologies for transmogrifying the subject) [log in to unmask]