>> No comments, no naming conventions, no primary key fields on major tables, swathes of code cut and pasted from other apps .....

I thought that Foxpro was the worst language in the world !

Now I know that Fox is the best - the system I was fixing was the worst :) <<

Unfortunately, there's a ton of FoxPro code like that out there. The reason there is more bad Xbase code than in many other languages (C/C++, for instance) is that, at least until VFP 3.0 came along, the barrier to entry was very low. Given the ease of dBASE III-style coding, a halfway intelligent person who didn't happen to be a professional programmer could bang out an app and get it to work. These apps weren't built for maintenance or scalability, but at the time they were written, they worked. (More or less <g>). VFP ended that because now you do have to be a professional programmer to build an app with it, but there are thousands and thousands and thousands of those dBASE III-style legacy apps which were written by amateurs, still running. Even in FoxPro apps which have been maintained and upgraded over the years, by pros, there are usually grungy old parts which just about make you throw up to look at them. Some of this stuff is so clearly brittle (hundreds of lines of procedural code, no comments, "magic numbers", undocumented code values which cause different branches, etc.) you hardly dare touch it because you almost know you won't wind up with the same results.

Mike