There's no string literal in your test code. It shows that WAIT command has limit of the 254 characters on the text it can display. BTW, that limi'st been increased to 255 charactes in VFP8Beta.

>>The string literal can be up to 255 characters long. The character field in a table on other hand can only be 254 characters. I hope this will clear confusion.
>
>hmmm try :
>lcTheString= replicate("E",255)
>wait wind lcTheString
>
>That gives me an error, but if you try with 254 instead of 255 no error.
>
>Einar