>I think it would be overkill to have additional parameter or SET command. In your case, you can always use INT().

Well, the situation has been ok for years. I never had to change anything in there. With VFP 8, I noticed that it acts differently on some situations. So, based on that, an overall setting for me would do it. As, I'd need to make sure that all other calls to PADL() in order functions would succeed as well. For now, I've added a hook in one function that I've detected that acts strange. In that function, I have PADL(). In order to assure that it'll always work, I had to convert the value to INT() before the PADL() but I don't like it. :)