Jim,

>But it is different in one important respect - both Hacker's for 6 and Hacker's for 7 state unequivocally that REINDEX does not remove "bloat" from .CDX files. In their case they specifically mention space used 'by former indexes'.
>Now that is wrong!!! And many people here rely on Hacker's more than they do on the VFP documentation itself [I don't need a lecture that such is a stupid thing to do - people do do it. period].

>Now FP2.6 and VFP6SP5, the only 2 prior versions where I had tried my simple REINDEX test, BOTH showed that the .CDX tables were reduced in size by a REINDEX when that .CDX contained (node?) entries that were no longer 'active' as a result of subsequent records added.
>And here is a quote by DavidF from thread #523073 message #523415 "A lesser bloat is caused by B+ tree fragmentation caused by the normal insertion of records. I don't recall when the REINDEX command started recovering deleted tag space. I don't think it did back in FP2.x. It does in VFP5 and VFP6 which are the only versions I have on this machine.".

The message of mine that you quote above has code that shows that the text you "quote" from the Hacker's Guide is incorrect. REINDEX can and does recover CDX bloat caused by deleted tags.

>So I simply reported it as a problem when I found otherwise with VFP7SP1.

Your original post in this thread does not include any reference to deleted index tags, which to 99.99% of the FoxPro developers is the definition of CDX bloat.