Walter

>>>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

I'ld estimate the above is correct for more than 80% of the cases. Fringe cases are:
- very often used routines into which this possibly falls (some people check about every variable/property/field before access)
- using vfp on web servers, where the cpu-cycles might be wanted by another process in between.

In desktop apps it might mean a few milliseconds, but server side might be consuming a scarce resource, and myself I have no problem testing the error handler if a "memory-read" I think needs to be there is unavailable<g>. And I know you have this in the back of your brain as well <g>

regards

thomas