>>You shouldn't use an alias in RECNO() or similar functions because a query always uses internal alliases for tables involved. If you do, than you reference an alias outside of a query.
>
>Sure, that's what my testing just showed. Even explicitly calling the alias of the derived query tries to go outside (my Test #2). It just shows that these two overloads of RECNO() have different behaviour.

The RECNO accepts an workarea alias as parameter. A name of derived table isn't an workarea alias. Neither is 'TableAlias' in

SELECT * FROM mytable AS TableAlias ...