>Hi Mike,
>
>I have no doubt that FIELD() is fater. What I'm curious about, where such difference will be significant?
>
>>OK. That's good to know. Thanks. I've put together a program to show field() is still faster.

I've found that some people are trying to make their application faster by looking into such cases. I really is beyond me as its significance is about zero in all but a very few exceptional cases. Most, if not all, performance problems are due to heavy data processing, networktraffic or other I/O, and not in simple commands like this. It is much better to focus on this rather than spending hours and hours to optimize a routine that only will give you an advantage of a few milliseconds in thousands of calls. I'd rather spend my time on trying to identify and optimize common performance bottlenecks