Nancy,

>Specifally (or on top of the xBASE commands which would seem to be necessary to let go of) wouldn't we need to let go of variant data types, and wouldn't that be a huge impact?

I would think that there would certainly be an issue of real strong-typing vs. pseudo-strong-typing (development mode only) that VFP7 has. However, I'm not the one to address that, as I haven't really played in other languages much.

Related to the xbase commands: They would not necessarily ALL have to be done away with, because it would be possible to map certain of them over to ADO+ language constructions. The biggest problems with data commands, I think, would be things related to scope that depend on a record pointer in natural record order, like:

REPLACE REST somefield WITH someexpr
DELETE NEXT 10
etc

although, certain of those could even work if there was a certain indexed order set, which could correspond to an order in a recordset.