I am writing a statistics type of application (using MFC incidentally), and I have kind of hit a wall. Right now I use the standard streams, containers, etc. from the STL to get my data in from text files, write them to other files in particular formats, and run FORTRAN routines expecting those other files to be prepared in a particular way. I'd like to clean this process up, but I have a few questions I need answered before I get started. Generally speaking, in data analysis or stat apps, it seems like the programs have very sophistocated data matrices, which they can transpose and operate on. Is it reasonable to assume they have written matrix classes from scratch, or do they use the STL, inherit from the STL? Second, the process of getting data from files seems very error prone ( ifstream, fin >> float, etc.). Where might I find info on getting data in from files more cleanly, importing non ASCII files (Like Excel), etc? I know these are broad questions, but this is a non-expert programmer attempting to make the transition from somewhat hack program to well-written program, object oriented and all. I'm reading up on the STL and the Design Patterns book by Gamma, so hopefully I'll get some ideas. Thoughts?