Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 30 Sep 2024 19:53:49 GMT, rbowman wrote:

I've worked with interfaces where the data fields are determined by the
character position in the string with spaces used to pad fields. It was
fun explaining to the support people configuring the queries that what
appeared to be an empty field had to be exactly 5 spaces or the whole
thing would be thrown off.

Leftovers from the punch-card era, perhaps?

I would wrap that in some kind of more user-friendly frontend, that would
accept more forgiving input, and properly pack it into the necessary
fixed-length fields for the backend.