>VFP6 has a function that returns a date from year, month and day numbers - i.e. DATE(1998,2,28) will return 02/28/1998. Is there a better way in VFP5 than to build a date string from the values and pass it to the CTOD function?

Ernest,

I can't recall for sure, but I think that VFP 5.0 did support the strict date syntax for expressing dates. IOW {^2001/8/24}. If so, all you'd need to is use evalute this in a string.