>If they have to be free tables, the 10 character limit is something you'll have to live with. As Sylvain said, it's for backward compatibility.

For me it's really difficult to live with.

>
>>I'm aware of the fact you can use a dbc to put a table with field names longer than 10 characters.
>>
>>I ask this because we are using a (well known) financial modelling software that is built in Visual Foxpro. Input for these models are mostly free dbf tables, the problem what I encounter is to define understandable(unique) field names.
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>>>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 fieldnamejavascript:MessageSubmit()
[Save this message so it will appear for other members immediately] s 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?