>>>Is that correct? I thought that SQL aliases have nothing to do with A-J aliases for work areas.
>>>
>>>>It's a bad idea to use one leter meaningless table aliases in a query. It makes the query totally unreadable. It also could be dangerous because letters A-J are reserved for workareas 1-10.
>>
>>From my testing, you are correct: Message#1154483
>
>It's no longer a problem, but at one time, you could get unexpected results with something along these lines:
>
>

>SELECT 1
>USE MyTable && now in workarea A
>
>SELECT ... ;
>  FROM AnotherTable A ;
>  ...
>

>
>VFP would get confused over what A meant.

Well, my understanding is that the *idea* behind the SQL engine has been complete isolation, for a very long time. For example, the warnings about using UDFs in SQL commands (in VFP9 help, "Considerations for SQL Select Statements") have been there for a long time (i.e. in a lot of earlier versions).

During development and testing I've occasionally seen weird errors using single-letter aliases, but for me it's always been caused by a violation of the rules set forth in the Help section referenced above.

I suppose there could be a *bug* in one or more VFP version(s) that might make it act up as you describe. I have some heavily-used VFP apps that do some serious data munging in VFP5, using single-letter aliases and I've never had a reported problem. I'd be interested in knowing if anyone else has run into any problems, or has some repro code that shows any such problem in VFP5 or later.