>Peter,
>
>Is this UDF in it's own PRG file and is the first executable line:
>
>FUNCTION ICantBelieveThisIsSoSlow(...)
>
>If so, simply comment out the FUNCTION declaration and see if it speeds it back up. I've never gotten an adequate explanation as to why this slows FoxPro down so badly, but it definately does.
>
David,

Terrific catch! I think you may found the reason for Peter's problem.

To demonstrate, I created a function (named Foo, the industry standard name < g >). Foo accepts no parameters, nor returns a value. This takes the unnecessary overhead of the assignment statement and the parameter call out of the mix. Here's the code I used to test:

FUNCTION Foo
  RETURN
ENDFUNC
* Test code
lnstart = SECOND()
FOR lin = 1 TO 10000
 = Foo()
NEXT
lnstop = SECONDS()
? lnstop - lnstart

When the FUNCTION/ENDFUNC were present, the average total time for the calls were 84.166. Without the FUNCTION/ENDFUNC pair, the average total time was 0.103. The test was run on a P200 with 64 mgb of RAM (sorry, I'm behind the hardware curve here< bg >).