Bill,

What version of Water/SteamXML are you running? From your code, it
looks like it should give you the output you expect.

A second thing to watch for is that Water has undergone some changes
since the Water book was published. Not all of the examples produce
output identical to the book.

The integer cast you are attempting in your first post doesn't
appear to be working--as you pointed out. I even tried turning
Options/Type Checking to Error in the IDE, and it still had no
problem with the obvious "string" data. A programmer would not
generally attempt such an obvious casting conflict, but the fact
that an obvious one works leaves room to suspect that much more
subtle errors could creep in unawares.

<set some_thing=<thing x="5"=integer/> />
some_thing.x._parent._name
==> string

_Merrick