>Naomi, I question the judgment of this for anything more than a few items.
Joining against a temp table/table variable/subquery/etc is the way to go.

IIRC In () gets expanded into a cursor in vfp already,
so I surmise that SQL server and others in this league implement it such as well.
Under this assumption, the In() way of coding is probably the easiest and most
portable way to code for things like a filter with a user-defined ad-hoc list of items.

my 0.02 EUR

thomas