Thanks for replying Gerry!

>"Delphi doesn't compete with VFP; it competes with VB (and VC)."

Sorry, but I couldn't understand your statement, because I've in my mind that VFP competes with VB (then VFP competes with Delphi) and it's far better than it. We're saying that all the time, right!

OTOH, I'm a former Turbo Pascal programmer (I programmed with TPascal from 1988 to 1990 - I was coming from mainframe, and besides COBOL I used to program in Algol, so found Pascal very close to it, else programmed in PL/I, close too).

In 1990 I shifted to FoxBase+ then FoxPro and VFP, and found then much better than Turbo Pascal to make my apps and abandomned Turbo Pascal at all.

Why I made the question "How does VFP 7 compares to Delphi 6?"?

As you get deeper into VFP programming you start to work close to Windows APIs and have to have some more knowledge about Windows "internals/intrinsics" (like the Algol people call that kind of stuff) to understand and/or make some things, so I faced many problems that great folks here at UT (thanks to them!) helped me. Then I found that these folks don't work with plain VFP coding only, they also complement their toolbox with many many other tools, including C++ and Delphi.

Well, since I saw C for the first time in 1988 I found it terrible and cumbersome (sorry if I misused the word), at that time I was programming in Algol and IBM Assembly language) and just made a few "Hello World" programs, disliked and dropped it. Then found Turbo Pascal...

Folks here at UT also gave me good advice saying that I should add more tools to my box, and many of these tools fall in the C category (C++, Java or the newer C#), and because of what I stated above, found that not to be a good choice to me. I understand that "C" is Microsoft choice letter in the alphabet, but that's hard to swallow to me.

What to do? Started looking around here and elsewhere, with my mind as open as possible (not really, since the C gender was not in my set of prospectives) and then took a look at Delphi. Found it much "lower level" programming than VFP (you must write more code, care more about a lot of things, sometimes get deeper to do tasks etc), it's true, but far more easy than C, IMO, and it also implements those close to windows stuff (achieved only by C programmers), like strong data typing, structures (records), memory handling, thread control, native drivers to the main DB engines, Delphi 6 has all those Web Services (VFP has no .NET support - still don't know what that means to VFP people, so that's why I'm asking for your help) etc.

Again, as a former Turbo Pascal programmer (and Dijkstra's follower, who states that a programming language, thus a program must be elegant - I can't see it in C syntax or in C programs, my apologies to the vast majority that likes C, is not my intent to offend anybody, just to show my own preferences and justify then) it's far easy to add Delphi to my box than any flavor of C.

When to use it? Whenever I needed C, to complement my VFP apps, or even to write the whole thing in it, if that's the case.

Also I could notice that many VFP people has Delphi as their second choice. Maybe whe should ask why, since that could help me in evaluating my positioning in relation to this tool.

Returning to the quote I made of your reply, I might think that VB would compete with Delphi only because it (VB) exposes more Windows functionality than VFP and has more "horsepower" (strengths) than VFP. It's hard to believe in that, and if that is true I'll be really sad. I might also think that the path that the VFP team chose to follow to implement VFP is rather different from that of the VB team, making VB a rather C independent tool, while VFP developpers should instead have to use the C crutch to acomplish the same tasks.

Correct me, please, if I'm wrong. I can understand that what I'm saying are strong words, but is not my intention at all, please folks, to offend or hurt anybody's feelings, and hope you understand the serious motivation of this discussion.

I want to keep along with VFP as far as I can and be able to proudly say to any Delphi developper: "Man you use a real great tool, my compliments for that, but follow my advice, take a time and look at VFP and I bet that'll make you think a lot in addopting it"!

Pardom me for the massive reply, but hope you understand that your (as to others) opinion is very important to me in deciding some actions I should make to help filling my toolbox.

Regards,

Fernando