>3) The fact that all variables are of type "variant" also both makes the program slower, and can produce errors at run-time (type mismatch).
>
>Some of these things, I think, have been changed in VFP 7 - specifically, I understand that you can specify the type of a variable.

Not really. The strong typing in VFP 7 is not enforced - it is only for Intellisence and Type Library generation purposes.
Even if you declare

LOCAL myNumber AS INTEGER
myNumber = 5

you can assign later

myNumber = "Whatever"