>>I want to create a very flexible program to interpret employee key punches (in, out, and perhaps missing) and by using a schedule and a previously defined set of rules, calculate the different rates of pay applicable.
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>I don't know whether this is good enough for you, but I needed to do something similar once, where the user could insert user-defined calculations.
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>Basically, you can have a field (in a variable number of records) where the user types in a formula, VFP syntax.
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>With eval(), you can then evaluate those rules.
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>For a complete solution, you may want to have special variables, which you replace before you eval(): for instance, the expression row(5) might refer to the calculated value of the fifth row. That is, while you evaluate each row, you place the calculated values in an array.
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>Evaluating VFP expressions has its problems, too - it is difficult to avoid that the user access publicly available variables or methods, which you had only designed for internal use.
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>However, evaluating formulae with eval() is very flexible, and relatively easy to program.

Thank you Hilmar.