Dear R and S People: I ended up using the "assign" command, and things work in S+. boot1 <- function(y,method="f",p=1) { n1 <- length(y) #n2 <- n1*p assign("n2",n1*p) n3 <- n2 - 1 a <- 0.5*(outer(1:n3,1:n3,function(x,y){n2 - pmax(x,y)})) return(a) } thanks for listening! Sincerely, Erin H mailto: hodgess at gator.uhd.edu