>>You are wasting cpu cycels because VFP pads the field back out to be a constant length when you use ALLTRIM(). SET EXACT OFF and "Name " = "Name" will be equal.
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>Interesting! I assume the "constant length" is the original length of the field? What about in an expression like AllTrim(first) + AllTrim(second)?

It will attempt to pad it to a fixed length, but that length may not be the whole concatenated string length. Essentially using ALLTRIM() (without surrounding it with a PADR or PADL) in an index expression is a prescription for a bug later on that will be really difficult to track down.