>I have four suggestions. If I'm being redundant or even repeating
>something over and over again, my appologies :-)
>
>1) a STATIC declaration which would be similar to the C construct
>allowing a variable's value to persist between execution iterations,
>but allow the variable to be scoped as well. Such a declaration
>might also allow scoping so that one could have a LOCAL STATIC or
>a PRIVATE STATIC variable (obviously a PUBLIC STATIC wouldn't make much
>sense). STATIC by itself could default to either (as you choose).

I don't see many cases were I would use this feature, but I agree that it should be added.

>2) The ability to assign an initial value in a declaration.
>e.g:
>LOCAL lnCounter = 0
>PRIVATE STATIC lcOutString = ""

Agree

>3) An OPTION EXPLICIT, similar to VB. I think this would be invaluable
>in aiding debugging and helping to create more stable applications.
>Making it an option wouold allow compatibility with existing code bases
>as well as enforcing shop standards where pre-declaration is required.

I definitly want to have this feature.

>4) Finally, VFP now initializes empty parameters to .F. This makes
>checking for non-passed parameters a little more difficult than it
>could be. Offering something like:
>SET NULLPARM TO
> -or-
>SET EMPTYPARM TO

Agree.

>Named parameters would be nice too, but I suspect that it would add a bit of overhead to the parsing routines that would, I'm sure not be welcomed in the VFP community :-)

But it could be easier to cut&paste VB samples in our code. So I think that it's a good suggestion