I want to add something to this. This is an age-old bug in the FoxPro app/exe compiler. Goes back to at least 2.5, maybe earlier. But it's an incorrectly reported error from the compiler which can be ignored while compiling, and causes no error at runtime.

This is for anyone else who may be reading this thread. I think everyone who's contributed to the thread so far knows this. You get an error when compiling a project into an app/exe, if you've reference an array which is properly in scope but the compiler doesn't realize it (because the app/exe compiler looks at [] and () as function calls while it's compiling, doesn't even check to see whether they might be array references).

If you ignore the error while compiling, it causes no problem when you run the app/exe.

I've always gone into prgs where this was a problem, and put the EXTERNAL ARRAY command, because I found the compile-time errors annoying. But I wouldn't go through all these backflips to try to stop compile-time errors from your report, when they won't cause any run-time errors.

My US$.02
Rich