The following gives the error "reference expected, value given", which is very confusing (it took me ages to spot the problem as being a mismatched procedure type in one of the parameters. I realize error messages are often very difficult, and it looks like in this case, the error was actually changed from "type mismatch in argument 1 of" (see Subject: Protected Var parameter bug in the list archives). You can mark this as a low priority, but it took me quite a while to figure out what was wrong. Peter. gpc -c peterS.pas peterS.pas: In main program: peterS.pas:25: error: reference expected, value given // This program is meant to fail to compile, but would hopefully display a better error message. program PeterS; type SInt16 = Integer attribute( size = 16 ); function InitIcons( var msg: SInt16 ): Integer; begin return 0; end; type StartupInitProc = function( var msg: Integer ): Integer; procedure SetStartup( init: StartupInitProc ); begin end; begin SetStartup( InitIcons ); end. -- <http://www.stairways.com/> <http://download.stairways.com/>