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>From the comments in the help system, it seems obvious that when they marked it as backwards-compatible, they were thinking about developing a form for interactive input with @...say, @...get and READ, but forgot about the other use of @...say: to create text-files.

Hi Hilmar. There are numerous ways in which this command is still useful. For instance, I use @...say all the time when writing small test prg's and want to display various progress or stats info on the VFP screen as it runs.