Guenther,
>In the comments at the top I wrote that the code snippet is roughly a dozen years old and I bet there were no name expressions in FoxPro 2.6.

Hope to see you at the frankfurt conference to settle this once and for all<bg>.
Let's be impartial: your computer and my old FPW or FPD, ok ?
I even created a large testing program including special error handling (just in case...) appropriate to targeted question in advance:

on Error *
lcRedirect = "lcBet"
lcBet = "Guenter Huber wins a large bottle of champagne"
Store "Thomas Ganss wins a large bottle of champagne" to (m.lcRedirect)
? m.lcBet

Thirstily yours

thomas