>Hi!
>I need a clarification to see if I'm right.
>This one is just to understand the way things are done.
>When accessing a table in another work area by ALIAS:
> - If using COMMANDS like USE, GOTO, etc. - we add a IN TABLE_ALIAS
> - If using FUNCTIONS like RECNO(), RECCOUNT(), etc. - we must enclose the TABLE ALIAS in quotes, passed as a String, or we got an error saying that "Variable not found".
>My question: Is that because they work as regular function like the ones we create or there is another reason?
>The first time I tried to use RECCOUNT() to operate in another area using table alias I spent a lot of time till I understand this. The VFP Help does not 'Help' in this situation because it does not make a note on this.
>Sorry for all of this.

When I came to use Fox in 1989, it was quite confusing to me that I could use filenames without quotes in some places, like the Use command. For me, being used to several other languages by then,

use "filename"

would be natural, but Fox and other xBase languages at the time allowed

use filename

syntax. Mmmm... OK, I said. But then, this omission of quotation marks works only in some places - in others, you must use them. Like in function calls, wherever an alias is required. So Fox knows whether it's a string literal or a variable that holds the name. So all of these work:

use mytable
use mytable.dbf
lcTable="mytable.dbf"
use &lctable      && wouldn't work if filename contained spaces
use (lcTable)     && works regardless of spaces
use "&lctable"    && works even with spaces but always looked dumb to me

now about aliases in functions:

lcAlias=alias()
?recno(lcAlias)   && works, it's a variable containing the alias
?recno("mytable") && works, it's a literal containing the alias
?recno(mytable)   && error, there's no variable called mytable