Ed,

>"Well" being that I can have lots of list items and traverse the list quickly and efficiently.

runtime performance: big advantage C++

>You need to do as much work on the VFP object containing the two pointers and the traversal methods as I would prototyping it by hand in C++; since there are existing list classes in both ATL and MFC, there's "less" work.

existing classlibrary: slight advantage C++. No advantage assuming that you already have an equivalent VFP classlibrary that holds these basic advanced data structures.

>The resolution of a property to its content, which becomes the pointer to the next object, which contains a property to traverse, etc. is tremendous compared to traversing a pointer in most "pointer friendly" environments, at least IMO.

runtime performance: big advantage C++

>Or Pascal, or LISP, or any of dozens of other "pointer-friendlier" languages. The linked list concept is not strongly supported natively by VFP from my POV.

We'll just have to agree to disagree here. From the code we have to write standpoint there is no difference, other than language syntactic differences, in the code I write for VFP, C++ or Pascal to manage pointers.

>There's also the issue of storing the list, well outside this discussion; the object address space in VFP is hard to translate into a native storage structure,

You can not persist the memory address based pointers in C++ or Pascal. Well, I guess you can if you don't mind lots of C0x memory out of bounds errors when you load the list back into memory. *bg*

>but much the same can be said of saving lists in a non-linear address space in general; there are OODBMS that are much better suited to this sort of task - Oracle, for example, has a strong Object storage class, and there are specialty database tools like ObjectStore as well.

persistence: advantage something other than VFP or C++