Hi Jim,
>My judgement, though, is that it is/was not a "bad design decision" but rather that it is just severely under-documented.
IMHO it is not a "glorious decision", but was forced upon the fox from xBase.

>There needs to be warnings sprinkled liberally throughout the Help in my humble opinion.
I'ld also argue for a "Set" to give you a runtime warning. I think the handling of strictdate was one of the best ways to get out of a intolerable situation. It wasn't forced (totally) on to you (you could still work with legacy code) but the "better practice" was clearly shown by the default setting.

>A good remedy for the potential Mdot problem is to never have a table selected, so if we could assure that state throughout our code then it wouldn't be the problem it is today.

Interesting way to stay clear of the possibility of the error. But that might hinder the fox from reaching the best speeds. Still, for about 90% of the code having no table selected might be a good idea.

my 0.02 EUR

thomas