Well Vlad,
Agree with you. I'm also sad to realize I'm not a good programmer anymore. I dropped using round brackets for arrays as soon as Fox started to support [] for them. Also, you could use them as string delimiters too, but never got it as a norm for strings. Support of round brackets, I think is just for backward compatibility.
Michel is right I think, in fact, you could interchangeably use both in your *own* code if you won't make others trace your program. It's just another convention habit. You could use "Shipped" or "lShipped" as a variable or fieldname, but I would use lShipped for that extra (l) reminds me the type too. Anyone could include comments or not as well.
And for *finish* I also think it as a bad habit.
Perfectly agree that MS have many examples that should be thrown to trash right away.
In short, I also would strongly suggest to any FP programmer, using [] for arrays.
Cetin