Hi Tony, Bruce, Like Bruce said, Ifeffit is a pretty poor excuse for a general purpose calculator shell program. Sadly, the documentation Bruce pointed turns out to be wrong.... The print function is pretty awful to use. It was inspired by bash & perl, but is much worse.The actual behavior is / appears to be: - strings inside single quotes are not evaluated - strings inside double quotes are evaluated. - spaces in an unquoted string confuse "print", appearing to mean separate items to be evaluated. The general Ifeffit behavior is to "keep going in spite of errors" and so it will spit out piles of zeros rather than tell you what the problem is. Again, it's a poor excuse of a shell program. Whereas the documentation says print "7 * sqrt(99.11) = ", (7 * sqrt(99.11)) What you really want is one of these print '7 * sqrt(99.11) = ', (7*sqrt(99.11)) print '7 * sqrt(99.11) = ', "(7 * sqrt(99.11))" For your question, print " the square root of ", number, " is ", sqrt(number) should be print ' the square root of ', number, ' is ', sqrt(number) although, just for safety, I would recommend print ' the square root of ', "number", ' is ', "sqrt(number)" as it allows an expression with spaces: Ifeffit> number = 19 Ifeffit> print 'the square root of ', number, ' is ', "sqrt(number)" the square root of 19.0000000 is 4.35889894 Ifeffit> print 'the square root of ', "number + 1", ' is ', "sqrt(number + 1)" the square root of 20.0000000 is 4.47213595 Sorry for the confusion, the lame shell, and the poor documentation. OK, I have a New Year's Resolution: make larch/ifeffit2 usable! --Matt