Because of the way the field names are stored in the header of the DBF. Modifying this would break backward compatibility. If you need field names longer than 10 characters, you need to put the table inside a database (DBC).

>I started programming with VFP using version 3.0, one of the first things I noticed was that fieldnames of free tables could not be longer than 10 characters. I thought that this was due the fact we were using a relatively old version . When we upgraded to VFP 8.0, this didn't change. And this really astonishes me. Why is there a limit anyway?