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Dates fixed in a YYYYMMDD representation. Seems like very ad-hoc representation. If you need "sixty days before such and such a date", ouch.

Shipping price conforms to a "pic 99v99". So what happens if a really big shipment needs to be made for which $100.47 needs to be charged?

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When I wrote the article I didn't have access to code I worked on 2 decades ago, and if I did I couldn't have used it in the article anyway. This was indented to illustrate the problem with problem with column 73, not to handle all possible cases.

Having said that, situations like would come up sometimes. You really did have to decide ahead of time how big field could be. You could leave extra filler bytes in your tables (literally named "filler") but it was still a big hassle to deal with.

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