>It's different from the normal way of defining classes

Define normal. <g> In the first version of VFP I worked with, we didn't have a visual class designer yet.

Remember, the language syntax and compiler are created before the visual tools. DEFINE CLASS is *always* available before the visual tool for the same class. (Although we don't always get to see the product at that stage.)

I suspect that they just didn't see a need to modify the visual tool and had other features they wanted to get into the product instead.