>>I had a table, provided to me, called 3CHAR, which was a table to de-code >3-char station names to their full names. >>As is my custom, I coded the file name as the alias on the USE statement. >>The program would work for a while after issuing this USE, accessing >records and all, but later would fail trying to access the file. All USEes >to "close" files were in the clean-up, so it was not being closed >prematurely. >> >>Turned out that FPW did *NOT* like the first character of an alias being a >numeric. Never complained, but did seem to ignore it. > >Wow, sounds like you were on your own in figuring that one out. That's logical, in a way. Alias name must conform to rules for variables' names, so it can't begin with a digit, and can contain nothing but 0-9, a-z (a-¾ in my case) and underscores, while rules for filenames are more liberal. A table name may contain a hyphen, but its alias must not, else it would be treated as a minus sign; it may contain an exclamation sign but that would be part of database!table syntax which may well confuse the parser, etc etc. Whenever you try to make an illegal alias, you get some default alias - it's either a single letter (A-L, N-Z for the first 25) or Wxxx (xxx being the workarea number, for the others).