>>>I am absolutely convinced that you are wrong. I am curious to see if you can prove your statement.
>
>I think we're both right- sort of! VFP Help confirms that if two strings are compared with the == operator, the expressions must contain exactly the same characters, including blanks, to be considered equal and that SET EQUAL is ignored.
>
>

CREATE CURSOR c1 (myfield1 c(10),myfield2 c(11))
>
>? c1.myfield1==c1.myfield2
>? c1.myfield2==c1.myfield1
>
>INSERT INTO c1 VALUES ("Hello","Hello")
>
>? c1.myfield1==c1.myfield2
>? c1.myfield2==c1.myfield1
>

>
>.F.
>.F.
>.F.
>.F.
>
>However if using SQL, == acts the same as = with SET ANSI ON- IOW the shorter string is padded.
>
>

CREATE CURSOR c1 (myfield1 c(10), myfield2 c(11))
>
>INSERT INTO c1 VALUES ("Hello","Hello")
>
>SELECT * FROM c1 WHERE myfield1==myfield2

Well, to be honest I answered to what I was sure you meant, which was not what you wrote. You wrote "I have seen issues comparing fields of unequal length, where == always fails" which is of course always false. I thought you meant to say that you have seen cases where this comparison resulted in true.