>Well, that maybe your definition of a structure in C and the "old days". However in Java, VB and VFP a structure is not defined by contiguous memory. It is simply an abstract definition of an object to make it simpler for the programmer to manage the object.
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Actually, in both Java and VB, structures reflecting the equivalent of typedef memory objects defined in C/C++ are continguous blocks of memory at a known, fixed location; if youy needed to be able to determine a linear address for some item either a part of the structure, or referenced explicitly by address using a pointer embedded in a structure, contiguity and static allocation were necessary elements of the structure. Whenever a thing referenced by a pointer could be relocated in memory did move, a mechanism to update the pointer to indicate the new location is needed. VFP manages this by using a double indirection that maps names to data representations through the NTI; if an allocation is shifted in memory, the NTI entry for the allocation is updated, so that the thing can be continuously referenced by it's name regardless of where it exists. Unfortunately, there's no way to track anything that might be a pointer that referenced that original allocation, so that if the data moved, even though the NTI reference remained consistant, pointers which referenced the absolute location would become invalid as a result of the shift in storage. That's the fundamental reason we lack an AddressOf() function for VFP references for memory representations (in addition, VFP's variant representation does not map smoothly into the standard data types supported by other languages.

>This structure can be passed around and edited with ease inside a program and used as either an entity or individual components.
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By VFP, but not by non-VFP clients.