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>>The other reason is that in most other programming languages, arrays are your handy data storage - VFP has better means of handling that, with its cursors that you can create in several ways and (ab)use in many more ways.
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>This one I can't agree.
>In fact, array is always a handy data storage... it is just that VFP does not architect it correctly (or in a perfect way) and lacks many functions to manipulate array,
>My question is if "VFP has better means of handling", then why so many VFP functions returns result as array?

Let's say, for example, that you do an adir() - you normally would have no need to put the result in reverse order, concatenate with other arrays, or even something as simple as delete an element. If you do want to create a recursive function to include subdirectories (there is a download for that), I can imagine that concatenating would be useful, but I think it would be more practical to create a cursor, which is easier to search, etc. - and doesn't have the 65,000 element limit in older versions.