>>David Fluker contributed an excellent FAQ a few months back on the topic of macro expansion vs. named expressions and EVAL(). FAQ #7841. I highly recommend that everyone who hasn't read it do so, even if you think you know what is oing on, and the difference between all these ways of doing something.
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>Thanks Erik, hadn't seen it before. And now I've added one more reason to use Names with parens rather than macros, with the NT problem I've experienced.
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>I don't recall how I (and many others) got into the habit of using macros everywhere -- I must've been taught that way years ago. Is it possible that in early versions of FP Names and parens did not exist?

Names have always existed. They are just the way certain commands are put together. The Parens, I'm not positive about (I never used VFP before 5.0a), but it was an old FP guy that first showed me how to use them, so I assumed that that method of specifying arguments had been around forever too.