>>>At Least it looked good in theory :-)
>>
>>I did not try it, but the docs say thats what it will do, (count actual elements, as opposed to the defined array size).
>
>It does NOT do what the docs say it will do. oh well

No, it does EXACTLY what the docs say it will do. If it's not an array, it's not an array, that's all.

If you want to test if a variable is an array or not, you can do:

IF TYPE('laArray[1]')<>"U"

You can't use VARTYPE here or you could possibly get an error if the variable is not defined at all!