I've had a few replies along the lines that "(*" or "*)" is valid code, and hence all this quoting comments stuff is justified. I have to say that writing such code is amazingly rare (perhaps only compiler writers will write this, and then only once in their lives), whereas I've encountered the problems with quotes in comments routinely since I started using OCaml. I doubt I'm alone in this. I actually have a small collection of programs now which have lines like this: (* ... some comment which contains an odd number of quotes ... [Keep OCaml compiler happy -->] " *) I think the behaviour is counter-intuitive, and should be classified as a bug, along with the other annoyance of being unable to write let f = printf "** %i" and have it do what you expect. Rich. -- Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - improving website return on investment Learning Objective CAML for C, C++, Perl and Java programmers: http://www.merjis.com/richj/computers/ocaml/tutorial/