>Hi Craig and all
>
>>No one has ever said it was impossible to have a VFP.Net...it's not a good idea because you lose much of what makes Fox what it is.
>
>COBOL.net is also not a good idea because we'll lose much of what makes COBOL what it is.
>
>Ain't COBOL and VFP cousins, both are data intensive languages made for data. VB (whatever it's incarnation), C (ditto), Java (ditto) are not.

As for Cobol being data-intensive... yes, you had to do some highly intensive programming pushups to get it to do data :). Not to mention the overly long foreplay you had to do before you could do some coding.

The purpose of Cobol was, AFAIRemember, to have a programming language so simple that even officers could do it. And it was easy on the compiler and on the runtime because it translated really tightly into machine code - because the programmer had to do most of the thinking and checking.

But for data it either had to be linked to some libraries (often included with the compiler, like the buggy indexes, courtesy of Microsoft, that I had fought several days in 1987), or it relied on system level data handling (RMS - record management system - as supplied by VAX VMS and on PDP-11 before it).

Even onscren data entry was an add-on in Cobol. It looked data intensive because it lacked any capability of doing anything heavier than that without linking in some extra code. I remember I had to write conform interest calculus in Vax Basic, because Cobol didn't have any exponentation for non-integer exponents.

>Then why reinvent the wheel and make languages that are not data intensive to become data intensive. And who is giving data muscles to these languages, the VFP core developers.

There was a good point somewhere in this thread (or in the initial article) that it's more a matter of choosing the tools that suit the _piece of the job_ than really choosing the language. So you may want to write one layer in one language, and another in another one, and in the end you aren't limited in your choice by data-orientedness of a particular language, because they'd all have it all. Well, almost.

While I believe that most of the good stuff from Fox will find its way into dot-net, it probably won't be as elegant and natural as it is in Fox, where those things are at home, and the syntax was like that forever. I think in dot-net there will always be an object around your cursor, and I think you still won't be able to just open a table or create a cursor, you'll have to create some middleman object and tell it what you want. Sort of like eating bread without tearing the nylon bag around it.

>The whole programmer (not just VFP) community is being taken for a (marketing) ride and the best part is we are riding it.

Or jumping off at stations, one by one.