>And of course one needs to carefully read the documentation. While we might be aware of when we delete rows/elements in an array and all the trailing items are "shifted," the same does NOT occur when you delete a column in a 2-dimensional array.
>https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstudio/foxpro/b26a3deh%28v%3dvs.71%29
>in the Remarks: "... If you delete a column, values of the elements in the deleted column are set to False (.F.), but trailing elements are not moved."
>
>Update: just tried out quick experiment
>

dimension afoo[3,3]
>afoo[1]="one"
>afoo[2]="two"
>afoo[3]="three"
>afoo[4]="four"
>afoo[5]="five"
>afoo[6]="six"
>afoo[7]="seven"
>afoo[8]="eight"
>afoo[9]="nine"
>display variable afoo
>list memory like afoo
>? ains(afoo,2,2)
>list memory like afoo
>? adel(afoo,2,2)
>list memory like afoo
>

>
>the results do seem to indicate that when you use ADEL() to delete a column, the trailing elements of each row *are* shifted.

Ha! So they are shifted but, ahem, horizontally. Well, in these 20 years with Fox, never tried that - good to know what it does.