In tip #17 of the VFUG Tips and Tricks:
"VFP has low level file functions in it's base instruction set. One of these functions is FGETS(). This function retrieves a line from a file and sets the record pointer on the next line. The catch is, it only will return a max of 254 characters."

In my experience, this is only correct if you don't include the second parameter for FGets. If you include the second parameter (i.e., the number of bytes to read), it will read up to that number or until a carriage return is encountered. For example, in my experience:
cMyString=FGets(hFileHandl,32767)
...will read a very long line. This was true even in Foxpro 2.x.