>>VFP always have been slow in string operations, I started creating such FLL solutions for myself many years ago. Maybe you can do fast using sys(2600). Normally strings are immutable, and s = s + ... operation is quite inefficient creating a new string each time. With 400-500 elements the problem is negligible.
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>>Yes you could do the same in SQL Server with CLR (and actually I did, for a real world app, that was otherwise getting ages to complete and was timing out with something like more than 10K elements - CLR version OTOH completed in something like 20 ms).
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>If only those pesky DB administrators at our clients would allow CLR to be used. This is the main reason we have not gone this route. I have a specific need to write my own aggregators, but I still have to work around them.
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>Walter

That is not a problem when the DBA is you :)