I agree, there is not much use to declare a type for local (private, public as well) variables.

However, for classes declared as OLE Public, defining types for parameters and return value types for methods, makes these objects behave in COM and COM+ environments much better.

>Agreed, but there is no strict adherence to variable type
>definitions. I could do:
>
>PRIVATE oForm as Form
>oForm = "Hello"
>
>
>and VFP doesn't complain. So the point is, other than allowing
>me so see the IntelliSense for known object types, why bother?