Hi mike,
>I wish you'd tell us what disadvantages you see. Readability is not a significant argument.
Well, readability IMO IS a significant argument. The other disadvantage I see is that you and others (Craig, doesnt use a m. on the left side of the equal sign) seem to have certain rules for when to use a m. for a variable and when not to. In my eyes that seems rather inconsistant. I bett it it is for every user who first looks at without knowing the background.
I don't see any significant value in the performance advantages/disadvantages that apparantly exists and seem to differ from version to version. Though percentagewise they seem to be significant (i've measured about a 100% difference with wide tables) in absolute sense it does just not justify the use (maybe in very specific cases). I'm just not convinced any user could tell the difference.
As I already told, I see the advantage of explicitly telling VFP the variable is a variable and not a field. As I mentioned, I avoid this problem by having different naming conventions for fieldname and variables.
>Drew Speedie's field naming conventions (which I use BTW) are similar. I think Craig was referring to your variable naming since you seem to not be using Hungarian notation.
There is a lot discussion about hungarian notation but the common agreement seems to be that it is less usefull in a OO programming (For further reading: search the web for Hungarian notation).
IMO, we still are stuck with old arguments that come from another programming environment and age. When we look at the modern OO prgramming environments it does make less sence to use it anymore.
See also
http://ootips.org/hungarian-notation.html.
Walter,