>Looks like I've been wasting odd lines of code for years then.
>
>I could have *sworn* I've used that lazy way out in the odd noddy code I've written in the past. Let me see now ... was it in PLM/86?
>
>Mind you, for readability, I'd still rather see something more meaningful, like:
>
>lnNumFiles = ALEN(laFiles,1)
>
>For I = 1 to lnNumFiles ...

I do that, but not for readability. I do it because each time I don't, there comes a case when I need that value elsewhere in the code, and I don't want to call alen() multiple times.