>I was hoping that on the second declaration, m.myOtherInteger would have defaulted to 0. Aside from knowing that the variable will become an integer somewhere in the code, I don't see any advantage to declaring it with the AS keyword.

The AS clause is for writing datatypes to the typelib of a COM server, and for use with VFP's IntelliSense. The "strong typing" is otherwise not enforced. IOW, you can declare a variable as an integer and still get away with setting the variable to a char value.