>Peter,
>SNIP
>>Statements about performance penalties have been abundant in the last decade and still have their impact on many programmers. I challenge those judgments and think that they're obsolete.
>
>You have a very strong point in this day of multi-gigahertz processors and huge RAMs and much faster hard drives.
>
>But human nature is such that we ALWAYS want to do the best job possible. In our business, coding what the user needs with a friendly UI that 'makes sense' to all users and simple deployment are the base factors.
>Then you get into things like code readability and verification of function and efficiency, and to most of us these are equally important to all of the other factors.
>
>I was going to say that it might be comparable to a Reubens or Van Gogh versus a Nelson or De Valença but that doesn't really work because in our business something can LOOK good but be a pile of crap internally.
>
>In any case, I do think that none of us wishes to waste anything as a general rule and that all of us wish to do the best work possible. So we naturally have efficiency as one of our goals.
>
>Now I do think that you bring up an important point - that "conventional wisdom" should always be subject to scrutiny. And I certainly feel that it is particularly important in our business, where things change all the time and in such wide and varying ways.
>I remember well WalterM's questioning of the 'always TAG on DELETED()' convention. While almost ridiculed at the start, his tenacity coupled with the fortuitous publication of an article with a similar conclusion in FoxPro Advisor resulted in an important shift in how many of us handle that issue.
>There have been some other examples too. Maybe some day MS will give us a way to do controlled fragmentation so that we can also exploit that to our benefit < s >.
>
>cheers

Hi Jim,
Indeed, IMO too, "conventional wisdom" should be challenged regularly. Although not too regularly of course. Thinking more about this, I think that the foxteam at MS sometimes has the only tools to effectively test "conventional wisdom" and that, in such cases, they should feel responsible for telling us when they notice that certain ideas are spread among forums and in books where they are not supported by their empiric evidence. E.g., a thread like this one might benefit from some input from JohnK or WilliamS.
BTW, what do you mean with 'controlled fragmentation'?