Hi, Mike

I'm coming to realise that this argument really is a case of personal taste, when it comes to readability. I suppose I was weaned on JSP, Yourdon/deMarco et al, structured techniques, back in the 80's, back in pure dBASE times, learning Fortran, PLAN, COBOL, Pascal, Basic, a little C, Intel's PLM86, et al. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't recall the equivalent of LOOP and EXIT (at least in the sense of escaping or short-circuiting a loop). i.e. a lot of lang's got on quite well without, thanks very much.

Whereas many of Foxpro's innovations and additions to the original xBase have been admirable I just don't see the need for these. Esp. when one is scanning some code to get the gist of the flow, these little blighters are snuck into the odd little nook and crany of the code and, to me, don't help one bit.

It's a bit like the current proliferation of mobile (cell) phones. Time was people were happy to walk the streets and keep their own company. Now the young cannot bear to walk without yapping to someone on the mobile ("I've just left work - I'll be home in 5 minutes"), even to ignore the person accompanying them for real. Everyone got on fine without them and, if they really needed to speak to someone, then a public phone box sufficed.

Similarly with LOOP/EXIT, we programmed fine in old xBase and other languages without them, now they're ubiquitous. And to top it all, when someone finds his code isn't doing the job correctly, he throws one of these in - somewhere - to fix it. Whereas for time-critical quick fixes or for throw-away code, this is OK, once they're "liberally scattered" throughout the code, to fix other bugs, they tend to break the structure and the later maintainer needs to have "eyes in his back-side" to catch them all.

Finally, I don't know how the odd person has got the idea that I'm trying to "force" others into programming my way - I know that's impossible anyway and I'd get short shrift if I tried it on, on the UT. My starter was that these are a pain in the parse - discuss (and it worked, eh? :-) )

As for your last paragraph, it's a case of you like loop - I don't. I'd suggest putting the meat indented in an If is no less transparent then as in-line code, as your example. In fact, my example, to me reads like "The essential condition is met so let's do the meat" whereas yours reads like "Oh, there was a possible reason for not going on there - never mind, get on with the meat". It's all a case of taste and perception apparently.

Now, any more of this and I'll be calling at your office with a matched pair next time I'm in Toronto! ;-)

Cheers

Terry