>>
>>And you can return more than one cursor (which people usually forget). I got some pieces of code where I send a string containing a very long series of SQL commands, which returns between 11 and 23 cursors in one go.
>
>It's maintenance nightmare because there's no way to tell what data each returned cursor holds by its name. It's the same as working with work areas using their number instead of an alias.

For such cases, I prepend a field, like this:

SELECT   '+' AS crsMycursor	;
			,	mytable.* ...

and then I have a little routine for that:

			FOR i = 0 TO nRet - 1
				THIS.ReAlias("x" + ALLTRIM(TRANSFORM(i, "@Z 99")))
			ENDFOR
...
...
	PROCEDURE ReAlias(tcFrom, tcTo)
		tcTo = EVL(tcTo, FIELD(1, tcFrom))
		IF USED(tcFrom)
			USE IN SELECT(tcTo)
			USE DBF(tcFrom) IN 0 ALIAS (tcTo) AGAIN
			USE IN SELECT(tcFrom)
		ENDIF

Of course, most of the time I don't supply the 2nd parameter at all - that's for a couple of special cases left over from previous versions.

In the end, this extra work paid off in speed of pulling the cursors, specially that almost all of them are related to a temp table that I'd probably have to recreate, or take extra pain to kill, each time. The speed is crucial, because I have to run this quite often, and my time scores high on my list (lazy programmer of the 2nd kind, I am).