My god, the change you put in to correct the problem with TextIO.scanStream really REALLY slowed things down. Some test code I had which read in a matrix which was 3660x1296 used to take 29.52 CPU seconds, and now it takes 1076.81 CPU second. I.e., it slowed down by a factor of 36. Mind you, the code was a bit goofy, but still...