Procrustean assignment

noun

Etymology

After the legendary highwayman Procrustes, who stretched or cut his victims to make them fit a bed.

Definitions

  1. A form of assignment to fixed-length string variables in which a shorter value is padded…

    A form of assignment to fixed-length string variables in which a shorter value is padded to the necessary length while a longer one is truncated.

    • […]the string that is being assigned to it is cut off on the right if it is too long, or filled out with spaces if it is too short - this is called Procrustean assignment[…]
    • […] that Procrustean assignment that the Manual goes on about: string arrays always have a fixed length of word.
    • Because the T/S uses procrustean assignment for string arrays, there are some uses for single-element arrays.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for Procrustean assignment. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA