Christopher,

There *has* to be a better and much cleaner way to eliminate "dangling references" than the way you propose.
The simplest I can suggest is (within VFP only, of course) to honour a programmer's directive to release a variable REGARDLESS. That way, when something breaks as a result, it breaks. This is far better than leaving some problem lurking below the surface, not really detectable in basic testing yet fully observable under load.

Regards,

JimN


SNIP
>
>Also I would love the ability to count the number of references an object has on it. A major problem in VFP is dangling references, get enough dangling references and the memory available to fox gets eaten away…
>i.e.
>
> x = CREATEOBJECT(“custom”)
> y[1] = x
>
>Then a command like ReferenceCount("x") would return 2. This would be a huge benefit to framework developers like myself.
>
SNIP