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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.
>
>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?

Good question - and my guess was that there was already a handy mechanism for returning tabular results as arrays in the earliest versions, from Fox Software. I've just found adir() in FPD 2.6 and I seem to remember it was there in FP2.0 or before.

Also, one difficulty in writing array manipulation is that VFP is untyped - and its arrays are untyped. So any element in the array can be anything.