>Koen --
>
>I did not say that using M.Dots seems horrible to me!
>
>Let me try again:
>
>It may seem horrible to some to learn that I do not use M.Dots.

I see a beginning of a beautiful holy war here... but it's mostly moot.

The horror is only in the time you may waste if your naming convention (and don't ask in which hotel do I organize mine) is not fullproof against the need for mdot, and you don't do mdot. Then, the amount of time it takes to detect and find the bug is horrendous.

IOW, we have two good strategies against this kind of bug - proper naming or mdot (or both, if anyone prefers). Those who apply neither of them suffer the consequences. Describing the practice of the other strategy as a horror is completely optional; claiming that someone will describe any chosen one as horror is understandable.

p.s. At some point I had to use mdots, but that was when I had to work with 10 character field names, and when there was no scatter...name. Nowadays all my fields have prefixes and sufficiently long names. My variables have different prefixes. I don't have a situation which would require mdots, and the difference in speed is negligible.