[snip]
>Too bad you got bitten.

Thanks for your empathy. :)

>I think one useful command would be SET MDOT ON|OFF, where:
>
>- ON is the current behaviour, and would continue to be the default
>- OFF would prevent VFP from looking at field names in open tables for commands as listed in the Wiki and elsewhere.
>
>With the double improvements of fewer bugs and a (slight) performance improvement in some cases I think a lot of developers would set it OFF in their apps.

The command SET MDOT OFF would cause errors in my legacy code if used in the init of the app, for sure. In my older and newer code there are enough places where SCATTER MEMVAR is done with references to the field names in the proceeding code. At least those places would give erroneous situations with a SET MDOT OFF in the init of the app.
However, SET MDOT OFF LOCAL or SET MDOT OFF PRIVATE would be useful indeed. Perhaps LOCAL should be the default behavior.
A disadvantage of SET MDOT is that it suggests that the m. will be ignored anyway.


>I like your idea of SET {keyword} TO {value} LOCAL.
>To me, it looks like your USE and HIDE proposals are just to get around this mdot issue, which would be already handled by SET MDOT. Can other uses not already be emulated with judicious use of datasessions?

I have thought of datasessions too, but I think their overhead is too much and that my proposals allow better finetuning and control.

>I don't understand your LPARAMETERS( TABLE LocalAlias, VARIABLE LocalVar ) proposal.

A local variable can be passed on to a function as a parameter. This is the appropriate way to use its value in the routine anyway. If we get the possibility of creating local tables, then there should also be a way to let a function use that table anyway. The proposed syntax extension for the LPARAMETERS command will allow such usage. But it's only a proposal. The foxteam can do better, I'm sure. Here's an example:

USE MyTable LOCAL
scan
   do Something
   do SomethingElse with TABLE 'MyTable'
endscan
*  No need to close MyTable
RETURN

PROCEDURE Something
   wait wind iif( empty( alias() ), "Empty workarea", "Alias: " + alias() ) timeout 1
   RETURN

PROCEDURE SomethingElse( TABLE tcAlias )
   local oldSele
   oldSele = select()
   select ( tcAlias )
   wait wind transform( eval( field( 1, tcAlias ) ) ) timeout 1
   select ( oldSele )
   RETURN