Christof,

>But it could also be that VFP uses internally a structure like value or so and only uses a pointer (or a handle) when a string is involved. Don't you think?

It really doesn't make much difference pointers are 4 bytes, most values probably take 8 bytes I'd guess. sys(1016) is totally inadequate to measure that granularity. It would take some serious spelunking with Codeview to get much more detail.