>You said: The syntax of the source code line was the issue. Not what
> it evaluated to at runtime. Using the explicit syntax:
>
>I disagree. What you are saying is that if I wanted to use macro substitution
>in that line, I would get an error, and that I would be prevented from compiling my
>EXE because of that error.

I think what it's revealing is that whenever the VFP compiler finds an ampersand, it encodes the instruction as is regardless of any requirements of syntax. This allows it to be evaluated at runtime to determine if it is valid.

Inside a quoted character string like this, I'm not sure it's such a good idea. At the very least a warning should be generated. :-)

>I think this is being handled correctly. It is in fact impossible to know that
>that line of code has a problem, just as for this simple line:
>

foo = (&a

Yup. Whenever there's an ampersand, the sky's the limit.