>>This is exactly the type of situation
>>where people are too quick to use macros.
>>REPLACE (lcField) WITH lvValue FOR (lcExpression)
>>works just fine.
>>Even if this didn't work, there is still SQL,
>>and with a RUNSQL() function, we wouldn't need macros either.

Agreed 100%. I've been doing an increasing amount of work in the last year in VB, and one of the first questions my VFP friends ask is always "how do you handle not being able to macro-expand?". Well, to begin with, much of the macro-expansion I see in VFP is data-related (fields, conditions, what have you) and working with DAO or ADO you already work with string concatenation. And, the stuff that's not data-related can often be handled with Case statements or other constructs -- not a "cool" solution, I will admit, but it works much of the time. This does leave certain percentage of "$%&!!$%" circumstances, but not as many as people tend to think.

There are an awful lot of developers out there, in many languages, developing many large and robust applications, who do not use macro expansion on anywhere near the level of VFP'ers. As many of us learned when we went from Private "drop-through" variable approaches in 1.x and 2.x to LPARAMETERS, etc., there are many ways of getting the task done. "Losing" private variables did not cost me that much, in the end.