>For this reason, PACK was often done manually in pre-Visual FoxPro i.e. the above steps were performed with a custom program, allowing the programmer to recover in the event of an error. However, this procedure will likely damage referential integrity etc :(

yes in VFP it is a little more complicated

you have to reconstruct the data in the DBC after the custom packing
it take sometime to write , a good lead in this direction is the GENDBC program that creates the DBC in code

Arnon