VFP has evolved over 20 years as a complete development environment, of which the data centric pieces are an important part. The other pieces are important, also, and the benefits of a dynamic language are a core benefit (as has been pointed out by MS to us when the VFP team was asked about putting VFP under the CLR in the first place). That's what will always be missing (at least it appears) from VB.Net and C#, which is why both of those languages will never be as productive as VFP, even with data centric features added. So it's not that Python in whatever version has datacentric capabilities compared to VFP: it's that IronPython, a .Net language, will in its 1.0 version, offer dynamic language capabilties similar to VFP, but not available in VB.Net and C#, both at runtime and in the IDE.

I'm not complaining, because Python in fact has some language features, like method-object passing, that would be handy to have in development, and IronPython effectively solves the problem of where VFP developers can go without changing to a different programming paradigm. It's just that using the knowledge of how to do it (move VFP to .Net) that JimH has developed, and then proceeding to take over the mass developer market in .Net, would be sweet justice for all the slights from the rest of the MS over the years, imagined and real. :)


>There are many features missing in IronPython that exist in VFP, VB, and C#. :) But of course if you do find useful data-centric functionality there compared to VFP development, post your results on your blog, here, etc.