On Mon, 30 May 2011, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote: Sorry for the delayed response; my internet access is still intermittent. But here's my 2 cents worth (not intended to be definitive). I agree with Jack's earlier point about keeping the number of built-in functions down to a reasonable number. To that end, I think I'd prefer to have a built-in "moments" function that gives a matrix with mean, variance, skewness and (excess?) kurtosis, and not bother with separate skewness and kurtosis functions. Rationale: mean and standard deviation (and/or variance) are wanted so often that it makes sense to have specific functions for those purposes. But skewness and kurtosis will be wanted much less often, and when people want those they probably want the first two moments too, so why not just one function for the "fancy" stuff? Comments on some other comments: (1) the median: there's already a quantile() function. (2) summary --matrix: the summary command produces a lot of stuff that people probably don't need in matrix output, and if we included all those columns it would make it difficult to find what you really want -- as opposed to just the first four moments, which is easy to parse. Allin.