Out of curiosity I made a few minor modifications so that your example would run in VFP6 to see what would happen. I don't get the error in VFP6 (the modified program will give the error as before in VFP9). I do not have VFP8 to test to see if problem occurs in VFP8.

The only other significance I can think of with ampersands would be with macro expansion -- though behavior in VFP6 doesn't seem to indicate anything happening with macros being evaluated. The thing about 254 characters does seem interesting -- it's one character shy of maximum length of "pascal-style" strings (where a single byte is used for length) -- which happens to be the longest C-style string you'd be able to encode within a pascal-style string.