Hi, I think this was discussed before (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005) The handling of some characters in messages is really a pain. for some externals I need to create messages, which should output $0, $1 and so on. of course there are work arounds. but easier would be to have an escape character like $ or whatever. today I needed to produce the character combination , (backslash followed by a comma). which I needed for dynamical creation of a special object in dyn~. well... shame on me I could not produce it. I donŽt want to say I found a solution after all, because, then you might think this problem is not urgent. It would be really a big advantage to have an escape character! ($# or $@ or $* is alsoa neverending story...). thank you. marius.