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Dictionary

Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

Procrustean assignment en · NOUN

Etymology

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

Meanings

  1. (dated, rare, uncountable) 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.
    • Because the T/S uses procrustean assignment for string arrays, there are some uses for single-element arrays. 1985, Sharon Zardetto Aker, T/S 2068 basics and beyond, page 38:
    • […]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[…] 1982, Steven Vickers, Robin Bradbeer, Sinclair ZX Spectrum: BASIC Programming:
    • […] that Procrustean assignment that the Manual goes on about: string arrays always have a fixed length of word. 1983, Ian Stewart, Robin Jones, Machine code and better BASIC, page 51:

Relateds

procrustean bed