>When I began programming with FoxBase it was standard practice to refer to fields as tablename->fieldname and to just refer to variables as varname. When FoxPro came out the mdot notation for vars became standard and I think I missed a basic shift in philosophy. In any case, I still prefer to reference fields by table and that is what led to this problem. Jim, you are right that such a basic thing should be given more prominence in the help files. My coworkers cannot believe that the little test code gives the result that it does. They come from VB,C,and Delphi backgrounds where fields are almost never accessed directly. To them this VFP behavior is really really weird.

In defense of the 'standard' used in VFP, it **IS** the same as was done in dBase as far as I know.
Same with the nothing gets written if the current table is at EOF() unless you use the (later added) "IN" clause.

We certainly agree regarding the documentation.
In my opinion it is the few things like this that drives some (many?) tryers of VFP away from it, and documentation could have 'saved' them and kept them in the fold.

cheers