>What does it mean when a developer has put this in the property of form instead of just quotes?
>

>=''
>

Expression in a property line preceded by an equal sign is eval()uated during the instantiation of the control (i.e. before its .init()) and is not refreshed later. So it's a once-in-a-lifetime, actually congenital, way to have a sort of dynamic property without really writing any code.

The bad part of it is that under some circumstances this expression may be calculated during development. If you have a

=TranslateToMongolian("This is a caption")

for a caption, and the routine TranslateToMongolian() is available but the mongolian.dbf isn't open, the routine will probably crash (though you can ignore the error - but having to ignore it every time you open the class for editing will become tedious).