Hallo Maurice!

 MK> As for the null terminator that is a hangover from strings being
 MK> terminated with nulls.  I am unsure where that idea originates
 MK> but I suspect pre-F77 FORTRAN.

According to Wikipedia it is a C thing but you're right about it being used
as a string terminator which facillitates variable lengths for strings and
has nothing to do with a fixed field length of 72 (or 71) bytes.

Het leven is goed,
Maurice

... Huil niet om mij, ik heb vi.
--- GNU bash, version 5.0.9(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)