Having read most of the latest postings about OOP in VFP, and having modestly done some research into this field, I wonder if we should not call a cat a cat and acknowledge that VFP is not OO in the sense most authors would understand this concept, i.e. a paradigm to analyse, design and program systems with a high degree of reusability (this definition is given for the sake of this argument, and does not represent an attempt to define OO exhaustively).

The fact that VFP does not correspond to this definition is not really a big deal in my opinion, the only problem being that the focus on the pretended OOness of VFP of some advocates is totally undesirable and out of line.

VFP is relational in essence, and that is perfectly OK as far as traditinal small scope information systems are concerned. The price to convert an RDBS to OO is simply too high both theoretically (most of what is written in VFP is customer tailored and not often reusable), and in terms of runtime performance (the layering necessary to encapsulate tables and views is bound to lenthen response times of all but the most trivial datatabase applications ).

My Opinion.

Marc