>By the way, I do *not* agree that strongly typed is necessay at all, personally. It works just fine right now, as far as I'm concerned.

Jim,

Jim I must disagree. Every high level language should be strongly typed.

Allowing a var to change from date to char on the fly is as low level as a pointer. Variable names simply become storage locations not an highlevel container for values.

One must pity the poor developer whose subroutine crashes and must trace every occurance of the variable in every property to find out where ldDate (or Date_gd) became a character string.

It is more disturbing if a developer uses Hungarian notation (or it's reverse) and then changes type. Imagine lnTotal could actually hold "23". Arg.

Strong typing introduces no extra lines of code except for a declaration of an extra variable.

Have I made a convert? :-)