>Records that point to other peers, especially where they may point to more than one of their peers, are not easily and conveniently manipulated with VFP's native data structures. You can (and if you need small-scale linked list functionality in an app that fits VFP well, should) construct VFP classes that implement objects that behave well as linked list nodes, but you're very limited as far as speed and capacity. Here, C++/Delphi/LISP and lots of other things work better, and although VB is not suited as well to constructing high-level list behaviors on a class level, it is not hampered by doing things in tables, being able to define native structures that contain pointers. VFP offers significant advantages over VB in terms of constructing classes to implement linked lists, but the cost in terms of overhead is too high.

VFP would really benefit form a lightweight and fast baseclass that provides the minimum builtin features. I have played around with various linked list and tree data structures in VFP and have found the existing baseclasses to bulky. A simple baseclass with just Init and Destroy methods would be great.

As to implimenting these type structures in databases, it can be done with relational databases through procedural code that requeries the table as it drills down through the links. I don't think that this is really that hard to do, but it is best handled by the network database model because its paradigm maps directly to the links you are storing. An object database implimented over a network database model engine would seem the best solution.