Procrustean assignment

English Etymology After the legendary highwayman Procrustes, who stretched or cut his victims to make them fit a bed. Noun Procrustean assignment - en 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. en 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 en 1983 Ian Stewart; Robin Jones Machine code and better BASIC 51 that Procrustean assignment that the Manual goes on about: string arrays always have a fixed length of word. en 1985 Sharon Zardetto Aker T/S 2068 basics and beyond 38 Because the T/S uses procrustean assignment for string arrays, there are some uses for single-element arrays. Related terms en procrustean bed en eponyms