I am playing with a new library and for kicks thought I would call its get-version function: | buffer | buffer := String new:80. PLplotLibrary default cPlgver:buffer. buffer. The above appears to do nothing; the buffer remains blank, and there is no error raised from it. I tried something more complicated involving external address and #alloc: and got the version number. That is encouraging from a perspective of talking to the library, but then I had to square the above failure with my use of memcpy() not long ago (different topic). In that case, I had real need to allocate a buffer in a fixed heap, but was told that I could ultimately copy from said buffer (which lives across multiple gcs and would move) into a ByteArray of the needed size, which would not move during the memcpy() call. That worked. So I tried | buffer | buffer := ByteArray new:80. PLplotLibrary default cPlgver:buffer. buffer asString. and get the version number. What's up? Why is it ok to pass a byte array but not a string? If there really is a difference, there should be an exception hinting that something is wrong and what it might be - right? Bill