>Besides, I always thought that all the string chopping functions (left, right, substr()) are internally done as Stuff() with special parameters.
You might be right, but that would surprise me. In most languages a lot of care is taken with low-level string functions to make them run as fast as possible. I'd bet the C equivalents of LEFT(), RIGHT() and SUBSTR() are (a lot?) faster than a general-purpose STUFF(). If I was a language designer I wouldn't want to burden those functions with unnecessary overhead.
This is just a SWAG, I haven't actually tested in VFP (or C)...
Regards. Al
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