Hi David,
>That would do it, but at the cost of explicitly requiring no dodefault() call in the the subclass. This is dangerous because it's only true at the first level of subclass . And since you may not know when code at a higher level will be inserted. For example:

My example was just typed in, as my missing out returning the method name of the abstract shows <g>.
Your objection is certainly valid, but something along the lines of

function AbstractWarn()
  local lcSetAssert, lcAbsCaller
  lcAbsCaller = Program(program(-1)-1)
  if not JustExt(m.lcAbsCaller)==JustExt(Program(program(-1)-2))
    lcSetAssert = set("Assert")
    set Assert on
    assert .f. Message m.lcAbsCaller + " should be overwritten !"
    set Assert &lcSetAssert
  endif

should be able to fix it for most usages (Again just typed in not tested ...Update - and on second reading might need some error checking to make sure there *is* a programmatic level -2 /Update). The case of a method *just* calling the dodefault() could be argued to be something for the code police or a valid use case suppressing the assert<g>. For me having explicit abstract levels has no merit *in vfp* unless there is some automatic tool working on extracting documentation on such levels or other on site "programming rules". But now we are deep in "opinion space".

regards

thomas