With regard to comparing Java and C++ to VFP...

Because VFP is weakly typed, it doesn’t really care about interfaces – all it cares about is applying operations to objects (in fact, Java’s interface keyword would be wasted in VFP). This means that inheritance in VFP is different from inheritance in C++ or Java, where you often inherit simply to establish a common interface. In VFP, the only reason you inherit is to inherit an implementation – to re-use the code in the base class.

thanks for your comments.

John