>One more thing, I searched Fox Help on this behavior and I couldn't find anything that explains why this is a good thing. Can somebody point me to this?

You're right, it's not very intuitive; you generally have to be carefull anytime you use an expression that contains an "&".

As far as the history behind it all, it probably predates FoxPro and you would have to probably look at early dBase when there may have been fewer options.