Although yours a viable work around, I chose to use a numeric field rather than an interger field (which achieves the desired result).

CREATE CURSOR moncursor (reference c(25))
INSERT INTO moncursor (reference) values ('1064')
ALTER table moncursor alter COLUMN REFERENCE n(10)

>Mike,
>
>It's a really odd manifestation that is for sure.
>
>If you make two passes through the file. In the first pass you can determine if an int field would work and then construct the cursor and append into it.
>
>>The use was the original table had a character field (data picked up from a textfile we the was no control over the incomming data) and the need was to translate the value into a value that could be used in a calculation. There a work arounds, but it was interesting to find the flaw.