>I may be missing your point about all this, especially with regard to those column properties.

The point was that VFP internally EVAL()uates all these dynamic properties. You can even put a function call in such a property and the function will be called on each refresh for each visible cell (which is, BTW, the way VPM paints the cells). I don't think you can put an expression with a function call into a dynamic property in any truly compiled language. Or an expression involving variable names or anything that needs to be calculated. You can only put constants there, because they can be compiled. If you want a dynamic property, you need an *_access or Property Get or whatever the equivalent method would be, so that it can be compiled. Can't have it dynamically evaluated.

>But my first reaction is that VB/VBA uses FUNCTION "string expression" for a lot of commands where VFP uses COMMAND stringwithoutquotes and therefore doesn't need macro expansion or EVAL().

Example?