Monday, June 27, 2005

Procrustean (adj.)

Seeking to produce or enforce strict conformity by ruthless or arbitrary means.

[After Procrustes, a mythical Greek giant who stretched or shortened captives to make them fit his beds, from Latin Procrustēs, from Greek Prokroustēs, from prokrouein, hammer out, to stretch out }

Procrustean bed (n.): a scheme or pattern into which someone or something is arbitrarily forced.

Procrustean string (n.): In computer programming, a fixed-length string. If a string value is too long for the allocated space, it is truncated to fit; and if it is shorter, the empty space is padded, usually with space characters.

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