>>Poor performance in VFP applications for the vast majority of cases is data access related in my experience. Bickering over an example with at most a hundred items in the list is just... well...

Agreed that reversing an email list isn't likely to require detailed performance tweaking- unless you're trying to process hundreds per second. I also agree that for many other needs, VFP's antique functions to process delimited files, are very speedy at getting values into a cursor- unless you're using dates, in which case IMPORT seems to screw up the year quite often.

Still, I quite like these sorts of shootouts. Now I know that Getwordnum is speedier for small sets after which Alines is better. I have been using Alines for sets of around 30. If performance did become an issue, I'd look at the few lines of C++ code needed to copy the string into a C++ array then reverse it then clean up.