George,

>First, your code has an error in it. You pass a parameter to a procedure without a PARAMETER or LPARAMETER statement.

Fabio has confirmed this, but does not change anything about his observations

>Second, no where in the documentation does it say that the ALIAS accepts a function call. It specifically states a character string.

I don´t see this in the help files. I would expect anyting that returns a valid character string would be allowed here.

>Third, the problem is easily by-passed by calling the function and using the return result as in USE (DBF()) AGAIN IN 0 ALIAS (lcalias).

Well a workarround to the BUG, but it still is a bug.

>Fourth, do not use the "is not optimal" argument. Fewer lines of code does not neccesarily translate into better performance.

Since when is optimal = performance ?? Personally I agree with Fabio in the sence that the fewer lines the better (unless the code get realy unreadable) I don´t want to read through multiple lines if not neccesary, but I realize this is personal prefference. Also when using such commands in data driven designs where you want to use macro´s one line definitely is better than multiple.

Walter,