>James,
>When I made the transition from FoxPro DOS to VFP this distinction went right over my head. Much of the code that worked in FoxPro worked 'sometimes' in VFP and I guess this is one of the reasons. I would have preferred that Microsoft has come up with a completely new syntax rather than just changing the behavior of an existing one- but then again I did not read and understand the documentation.

Calvin,

MS did not change anything at all, you were just lucky in FoxPro that you had never encountered replacing in a different work are when the current one was at EOF(). The replace command has worked this way for as long as I can remember (and I go back to dBASE II on CPM)

I can recall often answering questions about this behavior on Compuserve during the DOS days.