>>That's actually by design.
>
>Then the design is simply wrong. No program, of any kind, should destroy data without warning and with no reasonable expection that this would happen. I know of no other program where data is destroyed simply by renaming an object.

This is not data destroyed. It's a reference lost. Say, would you like VFP to fill your screen with tons of warnings every time you Modify Structure - just because you had the old name of a field already mentioned in some .prg already? Or, if you issue "Do Form Whatever" in a .prg, and it can't find the whatever.scx, so it won't compile (or even save) the .prg?

I think you're just asking too much.

>Naturally, I don't expect VFP to locate all subclasses (which may be in another country!) and change the method name.

Quite so, therefore it simply doesn't care - it assumes we know what we're doing.