We explore the use of genetic programming to evolve decision trees directly for classification problems with both discrete and continuous predictors. We demonstrate that the derived hypotheses of standard algorithms can substantially deviated from the optimum. This deviation is partly due to their top-down style procedures. The performance of the system is measured on a set of real and simulated data sets and compared with the performance of well-known algorithms like CHAID, CART, C5.0, and QUEST. Proposed algorithm seems to be effective in handling problems caused by top-down style procedures of existing algorithms.