Mike,

I agree, and I had *tried* to say that an evolving framework (product) is, overall, a good thing.

My point a few back was solely to say that an earlier "evaluation" of an earlier release, written by people who may be FP experts but still had *some* learning to do vis-a-vis OOP could possibly have legitimately come up with negative findings. We do all get better as we do more, including the "experts".

Cheers,
Jim N

>Hi Jim,
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><< I think that backs up my argument about an evolving product (where better is yet to come). Yes, it also says the vendors care and do improve their products, but who can say what they may have to trade off in order to continue to support facilities which may be obsoleted by (etter) Tahoe features. This gets expensive too. >>
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>Of course we, and pretty much all of the other framework authors, are constantly working to improve our product. You're also very correct in your assesment that we, and all the other framework authors again, continue to learn more about object orientation and that if we could start over there are things we'd do differently. Basically, these statements are true of any software product with a future though. I don't see why that could be viewed as an argument not to use a commercial framework. In fact, it's not too far of a stretch to paraphrase your statement into "By using a quality commercial framework as the basis for your application development and by keeping current with its upgrades, you'll insure that you're working with the very best and latest techniques in object orientation and in Visual FoxPro development in general."
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>We're actually doing a great deal of re-design and re-engineering work for our Tahoe version, both to take advantage of new features in Tahoe and to take advantage of things we've learned about OOP. However, we and I'm sure all of the other vendors are very concerned about backward compatability. I know in our case in particular, any new features that we introduce that break backward compatability with our 5.0 version will only be added if we feel the benefits are so great that they are worth the cost of the loss of backward compatability.
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>In other words, better is always yet to come, but I think the costs of not using what's available now are far greater than waiting for better to come along, because frankly, any product that ever reaches "best" is a dead-end.