>If you really want to, you could implement the same behavior in VFP using a THIS_Access method. That's how FoxMock (https://bitbucket.org/cwollenhaupt/foxpert.tools.foxmock) is creating mock objects that pretend to have properties and methods that are defined at runtime.

That trick is exactly what Steven Black recommended to me, and I now have a global oSettings object that will return any setting it doesn't have as an empty string (or null, depending on yet another setting), but will have that setting thereafter.