John,
No, I meant that leaving the c_append cursor open or closed made no measurable difference to the result- which is that SCATTER/INSERT is far, far slower than APPEND.
I completely agree that leaving memory full of variables may also affect performance- which is why I released all those ones I used to populate the source cursor. Actually a purist might observe that I should also have done something like this to populate the cursor:
DECLARE aMyArray(NUMFIELDS)
FOR lncounter=1 TO NUMROWS
aMyArray=REPLICATE(CHR(RAND()*254),5)
INSERT INTO c_source FROM ARRAY aMyArray
ENDFOR
FWIW, on my machine doing the SCATTER first makes no measurable difference.
"... They ne'er cared for us
yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act
established against the rich, and provide more
piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain
the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and
there's all the love they bear us."
-- Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Act 1, scene 1