I belong to the old style programmers where hard coding was in fashion, what i would like to ask is how does a series of commands like

create cursor ( ........ )
sele (org file)
go top
do whil not eof()

scatter memvar
sele (new file)
if ....
appe blank
gather memvar
endif

sele (org file)
skip
enddo

The SQL would be of course

sele * from (org file) where ..... into cursor (newfile)

much easier

The question is

is the SQL much faster?
is it better in any way?
does it give the same result?
are there any advantages at all in using the old system?