Walter,

The disagreement here is over whether or not the calls to the MAX() (or MIN()) function are significant. My position is why insert additional, and unnecessary, and only have to go back later and deal with performance issue. You have a P4 2, at work, I use a P3 933. I can't control the computers that are running my systems. In fact, there are Win95 systems. Why, then should I introduce anything that would potentially cause a problem?

Simple answer is that I don't. I don't want to have to trace down a problem that I can't control.

As to your answer about my question. I think that there may be a problem with language here. What you refer to as "flags" are more generally called "tokens". Given that, here's my next question...

How are tokens utilized and what do they represent?