>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.

David,

I just wanted to confirm that I wasn't crazy.:-) Agree 100% on the "right tool" comment.

I do think that comparing similar features (apples to apples, so to speak) do have some value in that they can help determine which tool to use. If you're going to do file I/O then restrict it to file I/O and keep the extraneous elements (such as adding 1 to every element of the matrix or calculating a checksum) out. In that regard, I don't really know if anything other than a byte by byte file read/write would apply.

Just my take.

Thanks for the feedback,