Hi all,

Hey everyone... We were having a discussion with a junior programmer about macro expansion and the topic of usung double dots came up. Actually discovered this quite by accident and I had to admit that while using double dots has been around for ages I couldn't remember all of the reasons and justifications for its implementation.

For example:

Temporary cursor named "cResults" containing fields named "cXML1", "cXML2" & "cXML3".

Well, I pointed out to Jeff that you could do something like this:

cDBF = alias() && cResults
cField = "cXML" + alltrim(str(nLoop)) && 1, 2 & 3

and then do this:

? &cDBF..&cField and you'd get the proper field.

For the life of me I can't remember the reason we needed to use double dots but after talking to Craig Berntson he suggested that one might indicate the end of a macro expansion and the second dot was interpreted as the 'normal' dot used when referring to a table plus field.

This seems the most accurate but I was wondering if any of you old timers <g> might remember anything additional to this.

This also works for situations like "THISFORM.&cTextbox..value" which would also make sense, given the presumption above.

Thoughts??

Best,

DD