>>>>As stated before in this thread, this is NOT a bug. From help on Alter table:
>>>>
>>>>ALTER TABLE might not produce consistent results when used with Visual FoxPro cursors created by the CREATE CURSOR command. In particular, you can create a Visual FoxPro cursor with features, such as long field names, that are normally available only with tables...>
>>>
>>>Pretext explanation. If long field name doesn't supported for cursors VFP should give an error "You cannot use long field names with cursors". That would be clearly.
>>>
>>>VFP behaviour strange with this issue. gives different unrelative erros with different conditions...
>>>
>>>It's a bug for me.
>>
>>You can in deed use long field names in cursors, but you can not alter the structure of a cursor which has long field names. This is documented, and thus not a bug.
>
>I agree that it's not a bug, as I already pointed out here: Re: Long field name bug Thread #1171727 Message #1171795, because it actually is documented.
>
>However, the behavior is troublesome and should be addressed by the vfp-devteam anyway. Arguments:
>
>- The developer is not always aware of the exceptions. Perhaps the ALTER TABLE is even done in a generic routine that cannot possibly be aware of the exceptions unless it extensively tests for them.
>
>- It must be doable for the devteam to alter a cursor that has long fieldnames or other exceptions.
>
>- If altering cursors is really troublesome in some conditions for the devteam, then they should have decided to not let ALTER TABLE support cursors in any condition.

Well, we may agree to disagree. I use cursors extensibly, especially in my webshop, and if all cursors were written to disk, the response time would increase drastically. One of the big advantages of cursors, is that they reside in memory if possible, and that is why they are so incredibly fast. If given a choice, I would choose the current behavior.

If you really need long field names in a cursor, and if you really need to alter the structure of these cursors, then you can rewrite your code to use temp tables in stead.