The UT is far and away the best forum in which I've ever participated. The true experts here (we all know who they are and I'm clearly not one of them) provide a tremendous amount of unpaid help to the community. But it's not a consulting shop providing an unlimited amount of pro bono work. Among other things it's a teaching lab and there comes a point at which the teacher has to say to the student "it's time you started learning."

So count me in Terry's corner. I've provided M some answers (occasionally they've even been useful ones) and I've watched Terry and others provide orders of magnitude more. I don't mind providing M with help for legitimate questions and will continue to do so.

But, if I provide a sample code snippet like

lcSourceTable = GETFILE()
USE (lcSourceTbl)

and he comes back and says something to the effect of "I tried your program and got a Variable Not Found error" I'm going to be more than a little peeved, especially considering the frequency with which this sort of thing has happened.
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>There is no one else in this thread who has "berated" him or acted as high and mighty as you.
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I may not have been as "high and mighty" as you perceive Terry to have been, but I'm one who definitely berated M for, despite several pleas from the community

1. Continuing to use Using SELECT 31 instead of SELECT student

2. Continuing to use Thisform.Text12 instead of Thisform.txtMeaningfulName

3. Not learning how to use the debugger to resolve "Data Type Mismatch" and other errors.

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>>I can remember as a graduate software engineer
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>You mean a programmer? OK, well I think pompous just about sums you up.
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When did "software engineer" become a pompous term for "programmer"? Perhaps it's semantics for you, but the terms have different connotations to me. Since I don't know either you or Terry I don't know how much knowledge you have of each other's work history, but I'd certainly accept any job title you chose as being legitimate.


>>No-one's going to better himself if he clammers for help at the first obstacle.
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>Does this apply to ladies too?

I know language evolves over time, and I know that we are in a period of bastardizing English in an attempt to removing supposedly sexist structures and maybe one of these days "they" and "them" will become both a gender neutral singular and plural pronoun. But, at the moment, the male pronoun is still used in gender neutral contexts. If you believe that Terry was truly referring to just males, then &&^%##@@##$E$$%^&&**((*&^%$# best expresses my reaction. Since I refuse to believe that of you, I'll just say that this kind of sarcastic, irrelevant personal attacks can only serve to undermine the legitimacy of your primary arguement. (I obviously don't agree with it, but it certainly is legitmate)