>In this case, the field naming was more to do with how the users think - everyone is active unless they explicitly mark them as inactivated.

You could also use:

SET FILTER TO IIF(lInactive, .F., .T.)

It might convey more clearly what you're doing, that "if they're inactive don't use them."

It was Brian Kernighan (the K of K&R) of C language design fame who wrote:
"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"

There's something to be said for inefficiency if it leads to easier debug and maintenance cycles ... especially so on non-speed-critical areas of code.