I worked at a big payroll company in Pleasanton, CA for a while. They had what seemed to me a patchwork system that essentially dumped a PCL image created by a program called Omniform to a file, then appended SQL Server data to the file, them dumped the file to a PCL printer. To me it looked like Frankenstein, but all this worked for printing all sorts of forms -- and worked quite well amazingly enough -- until one day I had a really strange error.

VFP reported that it could not find a certain member function in a barcode object that for all intents and purposes should have been in scope. I went through the code like a dog, scruitinizing everything, and reformatting the code as I went. In fact, I even tightened the scope of many member variables by making them local to the particular function that used them. Yet I never changed any program locic, that is to say everything was cleaned up but the functionality remained the same. I never found anything that would have hidden the object that couldn't be found. However, altough the program flow had not changed, it now worked!

Now I've worked with Visual Foxpro from the beginning. I've written stuff using LCK and all that, but this was something I could never explain to myself. It sounds similar to what was experienced here in this thread.

Does anyone on list know, can something perhaps happen to the VFP meory manager to cause it to just lose it's mind and take something that should work and make it not work? I've also seen weird cases where opening a program file in Notepad, and saving it in notepad, can clear up a problem in Fox. Maybe there are hidden non-text characters that get stuck in a prg or mpr file? I'm just speculating wildly, but I'm posting this and wondering if anyone else has ever seen VFP do bizarre stuff like this.

...Art
http://members.aol.com/ARTGR/