>>No, they are not public. They are a weird kind of animal!
>
>Neat, thanks guys. BTW, have you used this to your advantage in real apps, ie: where it could make code work when PRIVATE LOCAL or PUBLIC won't?

No, and I advise against it. As many others already said, PRIVATE is a little dangerous and should be avoided. But not declaring a variable at all is far more dangerous. IMHO, VFP should issue a warning for all variables used without a declaration.

Vlad