>>I don't have specific, repeatable examples I can give. -snip-
>
>Tanks for the reply. _TALLY seems to be working fine for now.

PMFJI: My observed problems with _Tally have been related to the value not being reliable if multi-table selects are involved. Apparently the system variable _Tally sometimes returns a count from whichever the last table used had, and that might not accurately reflect the count of the elements of the output table or array. (Sorry for the poor grammar here...) In any event, our standards here are to never use _Tally. In the example given, similarly to what was already posted, we would release the array, dimension it (dimension la_arry(1)), do the select or adir() or whhateve, and then test for type(la_arry(1)) $ 'U,L' -- which is true if undefined or logical (since we would not usually have element 1 of the array ever be a logical this is okay).

HTH

Rob