Barbara,

>>I had EXEs.
>
>I'm sure you did, but I'm just saying they weren't built with dBASE III.
>

Oh, I thought it was about FoxBase at this time in the thread ...

>>I can't prove it to you nor myself right now, but I've been renaming .XXX to .EXE forever. The .FOX I can't even recall (but I believe it), though the FOXPRUN I have at heart. Gee, now what ?
>>Anyway, rename a .APP or .FXP to .EXE and it just works. And much faster !!
>
>I hadn't thought about doing this, but I was aware you could rename some files, like HTM or TXT to XLS, and Excel will open them, so it doesn't surprise me. But regardless of the file extension, an APP or FXP is still really an APP or FXP and will act like one. IOW, I don't think you can launch either without something else calling them.
>

I just checked a few things :
- I think George talked about FOXPRUN. Okay, for multi user FoxBase this was MFOXPRUN.
- There surely existed FOXPCOMP and surely a .FOX was the output. FOXPCOMP we used as I recall now, so we used the output too ... I tried to rename the .FOX and run it, and no matter where you rename this to, it always comes up with unrecognizeable stuff. But it does run.
- I can't persist that at that time we were renaming all to EXEs already.
And now I think of it : it wouldn't have been useful too in the FoxBase area. It was FoxPro auto-compiling PRGs (needing FOXPCOMP explicitly with FoxBase), and it is just this feature that makes the EXE faster. Not because it's faster by itself, but because FPD (VFP too) looks for the EXE first, and when found won't look for any of the other versions (APP FXP PRG ...).



>>One last thing : I never (up till today) used REAL EXEs. Can't work at x1,000 PRG's.
>>
>
>Huh? What does the number of PRGs have to do with whether or not you create an EXE?

1. How long would you wait for the xreference to work out ?
2. We use an alike thing for our system PROCs; it's 800 PRGs in there, and the output is near 3 MB. Hence our near to 8.000 PRGs would come up with an unmanageable 30 MB, also thinking of our ability to upgrade at the snippet level. Further more, I wonder whether a 30 MB EXE would still run okay (never tried it though).

We use a one-time build of a one-program-only startup PRG (hence EXE), just calling the individual FXP's ... ehh, EXEs. Obviously the DLL's etc. are in the build as well.