>George,
>
>Thanks for this suggestion. I'm thinking about several additional #define at the top of my program and also local variables in aparser. That's a good point.
>
>BTW, now it runs in ~0.1 sec.
>
Well, don't use any functions in those #DEFINES, because they'll be evaluated at run time. Anything calling either CHR() or SPACE() should be a local.