>George,
>I just entered your example into a prg.

#DEFINE DEFAULT_DIR SYS(5) + SYS(2003)
>CLEAR
>? DEFAULT_DIR
>? SYS(5) + SYS(2003)

As expected, both lines return the same value - i.e. they are both evaluated at run-time not compile-time. I re-assert that the pre-processor in the VFP compiler does not evaluate anything at compile-time. All that is happening is the strings are swapped by the compiler before tokenization!

Houston,

I think that this is a mis-understanding on my part. I thought that you were saying that the return values functions were being evaluated at compile time, not run time. As I said to Erik, what's actually happening is that any function references are actually inserted into the tokenized code when compilation takes place. Therefore, and perhaps a better example of this, the following code returns two different values, provided a different default is selected

#DEFINE DEFAULT_DIR SYS(5) + SYS(2003)
? DEFAULT_DIR
SET DEFAULT TO (GETDIR())
? DEFAULT_DIR

This can be simply entered and executed into a program file.

This behavior, however, does not match that of some other compilers where a reference to the constant is inserted, rather than the actual literal.