Excerpts from an article by Miriam Liskin in Computer Currents March, 1986:
 " Yet another function, TRANSFORM(), lends - to a certain extent - the
ability to format data with the same PICTURE functions and templates
previously available only through the @ ... SAY ... GET command in
programs or format files. This function takes as input the expression
to be displayed and the PICTURE to be used to transform the data. You
may use any @ FUNCTION or template you might use in a PICTURE clause in
a @ ... SAY ... GET command. For example , you could add commas to a
numeric field and print negative values in parentheses with
        TRANSFORM(BALANCE,"@(9,999,999.99").
The problem is that the TRANSFORM() function does just what its name
implies - it apparently transforms the numeric BALANCE field to a
character string. If you use the TYPE function to determine the data
type of the above expression, the result is "N" for "Numeric", but when
you use the same expression in a report, it does not allow you to print
column totals or subtotals - as if the result of evaluating the
TRANSFORM() function were not numeric, but character data. "
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