Hi Walter, see my small comments below. :)

>Hoi peter,
>
>Long time no see.
>
>>Wow, don't get involved too much, okay?!
>
>>I think that Graig just only wanted to be of help to the person who asked for help. It's the task of the others (whereunder you and me) to be critical enough, but not to be offending. And I think that you've been somewhat offending and over-critical.
>
>I guess I am and I did be a bit offending. I'm sorry about that, but I'm getting a bit frustrated with easy statements and incorrect claims. This is not how we build a high quality VFP community. Esspecially from GURU we'd expect the information to be correct and well balanced because a lot of people are listening to them. I guess I'm offended by the incorrectness, non scientifical, inrelevant and flawed statements comming from the GURU from time to time.

Guru, guru... I thought you were referring to gurus in general, but now I assume you're really referring only to Graig!? Come on, tell him you're somewhat sorry and don't let it be followed by comma-but.

>>When we're talking about standards, we're not only talking about standards within a company, or within a single application. No, we should also have in mind the big world-wide community of VFP-developers.
>I think that is impossible. As I said before coding standard are highly personal. You could introduce a VFP coding standard, but every wiseguy will find a reason to change it.

The point is... the world-wide standard has to be SUPERB in order to be accepted by us all, that is, by the gurus, professionals, wiseguys, followers and students. And it has to be DYNAMIC. Not too dynamic of course, but dynamic to some degree anyway. You think it's impossible, I think it IS possible. Although... if it's not regarded as superb by ME, then it's not a standard for me. You mentioned DL. (For those who wonder what we're talking about, it's a reference to a company where Walter and I were freelance colleagues.) As you know, they tried to implement a standard and I opposed very much, simply because this 'standard' would have had the following consequences:
- It would fully have undermined the framework of the application that I was responsible for.
- This 'standard' would have degraded me to an untalented and slow programmer, incapable of doing what he was hired for.
- Many tricks of the trade would have been rendered useless.

The problem really was - and I know that you fully agree - that the to-be-standard was written by someone who had only very little experience with vfp, compared to us.

>>VFP is a professional tool, but are VFP-developers professional enough???
>
>I seriously doubt that. I've seen too much of VFP disasters (Again DL). Maybe there should be a MS certification for this subject only. But I think it even lies much deeper than this. The lack of scientifical approaches of writing algoritms, proving theories etc.

An exam? There is one, of course. But you're only referring to an exam about standards. Good idea.

>>What if there was an official school where youngsters were teached how to program in VFP? Suppose you were the teacher. Would you learn them THE standards? Or would you learn them YOUR standards? Or would you learn them to DEVELOP standards?
>
>First I would learn them to develop a standard (Write a sample program with certain elements in it). After that, we are introducing a sample standard (probably mine), and after that they're free to develop a standard for the rest of the year. Whenever they write a program they have to keep to their standard. They may change a standard with each new program (Learning effect). At the end of the year you could get all developed standards (of each student) and discuss them globally.

Hmmm, nice. But as soon as the superb standards have been written down, you'll have to teach them those, okay?!