>No use of SQL - that's one of the 2 big things I notice about really old xBASE code bases. The other - somewhat related - is if the code was started under FoxBASE+ where only 10 work areas were available. That could severely limit DB normalization and force the developer to go through gyrations with intermediate results tables and a lot of SET RELATION, SET KEY etc. *shudder*. Very fragile, hard to understand and maintain.

Did you ever get to a point where you'd build a temporary index on an epression which would include a field from a related table? That was poor man's quick and dirty trick, before creating a cursor, with a specific Order By, was available.