Hi Jim

I've found many people are not interested in doing things better, but rather in doing things as they have always done them.

>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