>>It makes sense when you remember that FoxBase was created as an interactive language, where users were going to be typing in their commands. So a lot of things were optimized to make it easy for the user to type the right thing. In that scenario, having SEEK "ST" (actually, early on, I think it was just FIND ST, without the quotes; not 100% sure, but I think SEEK came later) to find the first record that begins with "ST" makes perfect sense.
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>I'll take tons of heat for this, and that's fine....but I thank God that I've used SQL Server as a database for about 99.9% of production work. That's not a slight against anyone who has to use Fox as a database to pay the bills, but I am so glad to be out of that technology realm.
Agreed.
I've rarely attended a conference that didn't pay for itself, but among the ones that paid the highest return was a database conference I attended in San Francisco during the late 90's where I saw a demo of Sybase. After I saw that demo it became clear to me that "Client Server" which up till then had been shrouded in mystery, was actually pretty straightforward and was a much better way to store and access data.
I got a copy of SQL Server (I think it was SQL Server 97) and a manual and spent a couple of weeks learning it.
Someone had done a good job of creating SQL Passthrough examples for VFP so I used that method and have ever since.
After that I never stored my data in DBF's and that extended the lives of my VFP applications significantly.
A few are still running.
It also greatly simplified the conversion of those apps to .NET. Many of the stored procedures and views I wrote for the those VFP apps are still running with .NET.