>And the latter is more likely to happen. If you look at 3rd party code that is available its not very difficult to spot many problems in the mdot usage (when used at all). Again as I said above, the tendency not to use mdot when referencing objects is a big potential conflict with fieldnames. There is a very lengthy topic on the fox wiki describing when to use mdot and when not. Really?? WTF ?? It really shows that there is a serious design mistake in XBase which could never be fully fixed.
(shrug) indeed xBASE definitely has its warts. Some of it likely comes from its origins as an enduser product rather than a general-purpose tool for software development. And unfortunately it's got enough of a history that it's going to be really hard to change the way the language works without the risk of breaking existing code.