Hi Jim,

As FoxPro always handles dates internally as YYYYMMDD, I would have
thought the SET DATE setting would not affect the reliability of an
index based on date type data rather than character type data ?

Michel.

================= Your original message follows ================
>Michel,
>
>I've always felt that using DTOS was to ASSURE true date order (regardless of the SET DATE setting) and nothing much more. But that's a pretty important fact!
>
>I know of nothing better in VFP.
>
>Cheers,
>Jim N
>
>>It would seem that in FoxPro 2.x the best way to index a table
>>on a DATE field was to index on DTOS(Fieldname) as that
>>created a character based index which proved to be much faster
>>in operation than a date based index where, during comparison,
>>dates had in any case to be converted internally to characters by FoxPro.
>>
>>My question is : does this still hold true in Visual FoxPro,
>>or is there an even better way to have date-based indices in
>>Visual FoxPro 5.
>>
>>Note : I could of course run some experiments, but by posting this
>>question I am hoping someone else has already done the experiments.
>>
>>Much Thanks.
>>Michel Creppy.