>>>>>>>>PS: Did you try use "=>" with MS SQL or Oracle?
>>>>>>>Nope. Does it work?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Doesn't work...
>>>>>
>>>>>I wonder why VFP allows it? I've never seen it before in any other language (that I can recall). Even Visual FreePro doesn't support it, and I've added many new features to it. :-)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>I suppose they wanted to make it easy on the developer to allow both, but I find it very annoying. Very often I copy queries to SQL and then get an error because I got used to write it the wrong way. In my opinion it would be better to be more restricted.
>>>
>>>My sense is that a lot of things that VFP provides that seem odd are because it started out as an interactive tool rather than a programming language. For example, if you have a table open and enter a number in the Command Window, it goes to that record, as if you'd use the GOTO command.
>>>
>>>Tamar
>>
>>That explains a lot of these features. I guess the only way to have this changed, if it would ever have been an issue, it a SET STRICT setting in VFP, similar as the change when grouping in queries was enforced.
>
>There is a a big lot of such stuff. MDot for example sounds like Memory, but it's more that the number of workareas was limited from A..N (14) and m the next one. 14 workareas, plus Mdot + SELECT 0 equals 16 or 4 bits
>Never use vars named a..m :)
>
>Open some tables and try SELECT A, SELECT B etc. We tend to forget that
>

>USE MyTable
>SELECT MyTable
>

>means SELECT ALIAS because MyTable is an alias for the number of the workarea.
>
>BTW The number thingy Tamar mentioned is not limited to command window. It works in programms too.
>
>And, as Tamar explained, those XBase languages had not much idea of a program as they where new. It was all command window, not much interface. Any user was skilled in DBX commands. :)

The work area limit you mention is 10, not 14. In the very beginning, you could only have two work areas (dBaseII ?). Then it was raised to 10. And then it was raised to 65533 and data sessions were introduced, effectively giving us a unlimited number of work areas. This means that the letters to be careful with are A to J, plus M. You can easily check this in the list of reserved words in Help.