>>Now this was one thing that was simpler to do in Cobol... because you had to define your records, and could redefine any field in it in any number of levels.
>
>Not that I remember much of the Cobol language anymore, but this is one of the few things I remember, and miss from time to time.

Once upon a time (read: on a slow 286, using FP2.0) I used the same technique, in a way. I had a report which was just far too wide, and had a variable number of columns (of known widths, luckily :). So I created an array of long blank strings, and used a lot of stuff(aRow[i], lnPos, lnLen, lcText) to get the values into right positions, and in the end sent the lines straight to printer. Not as straightforward as the Cobol redefines, but then not so many lines either - and specially no need to do that every time you wanted to have a printed line ;).