>>> And thought that I had been through it all. Certainly not. I learned quite a few tricks reading this great resource.
>
>Recently I dug out one of Tamar's historic articles wrt a parsing need. The article covered the ancient Copy to Array that is very quick for smaller resultsets and resulted in new functions in VFPA to speed up bit manipulation- check out VFPA's new Calculate BOR/BAND expressions.
>
>I learned something else new last week: GATHER performs on-the-fly casting for different field types.
>
>

create cursor c_test (intvar i, dubvar B, charvar c(20),datevar c(20))
>append blank
>intvar="100"  && I am a string, about to be GATHERed into an Integer field
>dubvar="100" && I am a string, about to be GATHERed into a Double field
>charvar=100 && I am a numeric, about to be GATHERed into a string field
>datevar=date() &&I am a date, about to be GATHERed into a string field
>gather memvar
>browse

>
>Who'd have thunk it? Still learning new tricks after all these years.

Actually SQL server does do the same in many instances.

Walter,