>*Sigh*
>
>>>MS had nothing to lose and everything to gain moving FP to VFP....the reverse is true with VB ... the general VB community seems to want inheritance and all the other constructs that we have that they don't but they find ways to work around them. Can you imagine the nightmare if MS made wholesale changes to the way VB operates and it breaks all the myriad of applications running in VB, using VBA, or VB Script? To gain what?
>>>
>>
>>Oh, yeah, right. Like M$ has NEVER done that before. Ever heard of Word or Excel macros...
>
>C'mon, Fred, you're smarter than that. Macro languages changes can't compare to BIG HUGE core language changes.

John,

I agree, a major language change is much more work (and more likely to break things) than a simple macro update. My point is, they can't even get that right, and that's only simple syntax differences! The least they could do is provide a translation utility to handle the majority of the grunt work involved. I know of several people that have to maintain literally thousands of Excel spreadsheets with umpty-ump macros in each. Whenever a new version of Excel comes out, the whole thing needs to be analysed from scratch. Not very productive, to say the least, unless you view it as job security. I personally haven't run into the problems of macros and such, but I do remember that each and every new version of the C or VC++ compilers broke existing code, some of it in rather subtle ways that didn't just jump out as errors during the compile process. And it's not just new functionality, etc., that breaks things. Whatever happened to backwards compatible?!? I'm all for more stringent syntax checking to trap errors during the compile process, but hey!, changing the way the LOGIC works on me is a flat out no-no! Sometimes it's just new compiler options, etc., but even then M$ does a pretty poor job of warning you of the differences. One that bit me in VFP was the change to FGETS now being limited to only 8K. That bit me in using VSS (scctext.prg) was using FGETS with 65000 as an argument and caused it to crash, taking several of my class libraries with it when it did. Doesn't seem to be documented anywhere that I can see. As far as I can tell, this seems to be an SP3 improvement.
Anyways, my point is, major changes can be done with out breaking the world, VFP is a pretty good example of that. And gee, would it be such a bad thing if all the VB code in the world suddenly didn't work... ;)