>Oh, well. Thanks to everyone who tried to help.
>
>Maybe I should report this to Microsoft as a bug (in their next beta).

Tom,

I don't think that this is a bug. For one thing, VFP passes all objects by reference, so when you add the @ you're really not doing anything. In this case, since VFP doesn't know anything about what the object is it evaluates the first element. Note that this is consistent with the way the TYPE() function works. Certainly, I wish that this wasn't the case, but it's been this way for so long, that I don't anticipate them making any changes.

George