Good question! 1st was a Commodore Pet, but can't really class it as 'learning', as I was 10! Would say Basic then Pascal as a 'taught' language. Real pain came with assembler - some low level routines we were writing to catch keyboard interrupts on an obscure piece of kit. Fallback nowadays, based on the projects we build, would be Visual Foxpro as long as nothing too esoteric was involved Neil