>Thanks for explaining George. I will be using integer and currency every chance I get.
>
>That is so totally weird that numerics are stored as characters, though I guess that's the same as what's in an ASCII file! Here's a weirdie for you: I retrieved data the other day from an Oracle RDB database (not "regular" Oracle) and the field was supposed to be numeric, but came across as character! I had to SELECT MyNumericField + 0.0 to get it to come across as numeric!

Hi Cindy,

The xBase file format goes back to the early days of personal computing. One of the things back then that was a problem was displaying the data. The reason that it was was it was a slow process. Back then, we often used a technique called "page flipping" in order to get quick screen updates. What this involved was writing to an area of memory (referred to as a page) with the information to be displayed, then changing the where the screen information was coming from after it had been written (referred to as "flipping").

It's a personal SWAG of mine that the xBase file format was partially developed to overcome slow screen updates. Without having to convert true numeric data to be displayed properly, this overhead was avoided.