>>...on the other hand there's no guarantee that referential integrity actually exists, nor that ESC really leaves data unsaved (yes I saw that one too - awful!).
>
>A couple years ago I had the 'pleasure' of working on an app that had been begun by a rather high profile and well known Fox developer ( 'a legend in his own mind') A VFP app, but tables and fields were all named with short names, leading to creative abbreviations. Extra points were evidently awarded for never using the same abbreviation twice. 'Cust' 'custmr' 'custom' 'custer' 'cstmr' etc. Also creative use of singular and plural in naming tables, fields and variables.

I still feel bead weather coming from all the bullets in my foot... which landed there because of short filenames, and short field names in DOS and FPD. As soon as I could, I went for the shortest meaningful name. My worst two: field vrana, short for VRsta ANAlitike (type of analytics), which actually means crow, and sumpor.dbf - SUMa POReza, total of taxes - which means sulphur. And them sounding funny didn't help me at all to remember what were they supposed to be - I actually had to browse to remember.

Someone else had IndiAna - indicator of analytics - which was likewise distracting and not helping at all.