>I am experimenting with using BINTOC() on some integer indexes. I have a table I expect to be very large and would like to make the indexes as compact as possible.
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>I added 15,000 dummy records to my test table and checked the CDX file. It was 279,552 bytes for just integer keys.
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>I changed all four index expressions to BINTOC( ... ), reindexed, refreshed the view in file explorer and expected the CDX file to be smaller, but it wasn't--exactly the same # of bytes.
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>I am missing something? Thanks.

BinToC() is exactly the function VFP internally uses to create sortable 4-byte combinations for integer keys. It actually adds a 0x7fffffff to the number, so the negative numbers don't appear greater than positive. Using BinToC() simply changes your data type from integer into character, but it's still the same four bytes which VFP uses in both cases. Though, having them represented as characters does allow for concatenation, which is quite handy. I already have some tables where I have a PK constructed as BinToC(FKey)+BinToC(LocalKey) and such.