Jim,

>So they were giving you a way to bypass the 'natural' way of doing things if it was useful to you. You call this "optimization"???

90% of all compiler optimizations wind up being a "natural" way of doing things. The simple goal is to reduce the number of CPU cycles a block of code takes to execute. Two of the easier ones, code hoisting and common subexpression elimination, are typically done in the source code by good programmers. The interpretive nature of Xbase though prevents the compiler from from internally doing these optimizations, we have to code them ourselves.