>>>> 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

Also does with an object, on-the-fly conversion will work where insert from name won't (which is weird, though).

>Actually SQL server does do the same in many instances.

Not quite. Its conversion is very limited - you may have two million strings containing digits and they'll be converted into integers, but then a sixteen minute transaction will take a long time to revert because two million and first string contains digits and an extra character. It will bang gloriously, and I think you know some examples of that.