George,

It's clearly weighted towards VB/VC, who honestly uses blocks of data stored in internal memory format as a means of transferring data nowadays?

Frankly I'd not use VFP to do this. I'd write a VC++ chunk of code that would take the 8 bytes and return a float value. I don't even know if VFP supports that particular IEEE standard of floating point value.

The LLFF could do this, but why? VFP just isn't the right tool for the task. Why not counter challenge them to read the internal parts of a DBF? Or the internal parts of a SQL-Server table?

Arguments like this to prove one language supreme over another are pretty much a waste of time, effort and CPU cycles IMHO.

>Do you have thoughts on the other "challenge"? I looked at it and immediately felt that it was weighted towards VB because of some of the instrinsic functionality that VB has that VFP doesn't. Example, and I reaching back here so I might be wrong about this, but doesn't VB have the ability to read in a part of a file as a specific type? The problem presented requires that an 8 byte double-precision floating point be read. To accomplish this in VFP, you'd have the additional overhead of converting a string. I thought about appending the info into a cursor with a single field (type B - dpfp), but I'm not sure I can get that to work. This doesn't mention that the suggested matrix size (1,000x,1,000) exceeds VFP's limit on array size.