>From Steve Black's "Text" session at DevConnections, John's would be more efficient. Some VFP optimization on StrVar = StrVar + ...

Bill,

I'm not so sure about that. See below

clear
lcfoo = 'ABCDEF'
lnstart = SECONDS()
FOR lnj = 1 TO 10000
  lcresult = ""
  FOR lni = 1 TO 6
    lcresult = SUBSTR(lcfoo, lni, 1) + lcresult
  NEXT
NEXT
lnstop = SECONDS()
? lnstop - lnstart  && Faster

lnstart = SECONDS()
FOR lnj = 10000 TO 1 STEP -1
  lcresult = ""
  FOR lni = 6 TO 1 STEP -1
    lcresult = SUBSTR(lcfoo, lni, 1) + lcresult
  NEXT
NEXT
lnstop = SECONDS()
? lnstop - lnstart && Slower

I ran this test enough times to be convinced that the first instance was always going to be faster (by about 2%). NBD. What was interesting was that the second nested iteration structure had to be changed. Originally, the lnj variable was incremented. I got an error message and had to change it to the above.