> If only VFP had a System.Object < g >, a "tabula rosa" ...

Hehe, System.Object (and its ancestor, TObject) aren't exactly tabula rasa, are they? In fact, they are so fat they make even Custom/Session/Relation look lean and mean in comparison ... *g*

It's a pity that Empty was neutered to serve SCATTER object purposes only, but since all property and method names of all builtin Fox classes are reserved words it doesn't make a whole lot of difference - i.e. you could not derive a class from TabulaRasa and give it a .Top property because Top is a reserved word, and you could not give it a .Reset method because that is reserved as well (the Timer class has a method with that name).

As regards things like the locals window - you can make a base class that hides inherited (builtin) properties to render them inaccessible and to keep them from showing in debug windows but on the whole it isn't worth the effort.