  The paper is the written version of a talk presented at the "VIIth Winter
School of Hadronic Physics", held in Folgaria (Trento), Italy, February 10--15,
1992.
  We intend to illustrate in this lecture the possibilities opening up at
machines planned for the nineties for low--energy kaon--nucleon interactions,
keeping the focus on the theoretical problems they should help to solve.
  We shall deal here only with the $\phi$--factory DA$\Phi$NE$^1$ and consider,
for brevity, interactions with light, gaseous targets, using gaseous $H_2$ as a
benchmark for which to estimate the rates to be expected in a typical
apparatus.
