>>In short, programming to save a few milliseconds here and there is a very bad practice.
>
>Programming to make the code less prone to crashing is not a bad idea. Code could easily crash if - as you once demonstrated yourself while trying to debunk the whole mdot thing IIRC - field names and variables conflict.

Mike,

I haven't ever experienced a crash because of the mdot issue. What I have experienced is an issue with SCATTER/GATHER when the variable was previously declared, such as

LOCAL myfield1, myfield2
SCATTER MEMVAR
SELECT OtherTable
APPEND BLANK
GATHER MEMVAR

If the first table doesn't have a "myfield1", but a "myfield2" and the second (OtherTable) has both. In this case, the "myfield1" in the "OtherTable" will be assigned .F. (or "F") because of the declaration.

What we're talking about here are tools that are provided, free of charge, with VFP. Frankly, I don't see what the problem is. If you don't like the way the code is written, then, in most cases, you have the source, so change it. I have.