>Thirdly, because of macro substitution, if VFP did produce a native compiler, it would have to include the entire run-time library.

George, et al,

Years ago there was a product named FORCE that was a native compiler. It forced (no pun intended but I'll take it *g*) developers to make declarations and so forth and when compiled ran like a bat out of, well, you know where. This was in the early 286-386 days. Great product but it never caught on with xBase programmers because of the ability of p-code to do those pesky macro substitutions. Great product, no market. Our pals in Canada who wrote CodeBase have kept their product up to date - to their credit - but I'd sure like to see what percentage of their overall business is from FoxPro programmers who need the kind of product you'd get from a CodeBase.

Turns out that there's a pretty strong market for p-code.

Not only that, and this might start a whole new thread, but having the ability of the p-code functionality IMO goes a *LONG* way towards developing what I would consider the almost-perfect application. That would be the one where all application information is contained in tables and the engine just loads and executes. Hard to do w/o macro substitution.

Best,