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English
Etymology
After the legendary highwayman Procrustes, who stretched or cut his victims to make them fit a bed.
Noun
Procrustean assignment (uncountable)
- (computing, dated, rare) 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.
1982, Steven Vickers, Robin Bradbeer, Sinclair ZX Spectrum: BASIC Programming:[…] 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 […]
1983, Ian Stewart, Robin Jones, Machine code and better BASIC, page 51:[…] that Procrustean assignment that the Manual goes on about: string arrays always have a fixed length of word.
1985, Sharon Zardetto Aker, T/S 2068 basics and beyond, page 38:Because the T/S uses procrustean assignment for string arrays, there are some uses for single-element arrays.