Absolutely. Everything comes with costs & benefits. But I'm not sure I've, in my entire 23-year professional programming career, ever encountered a fixed-width text format in the wild. I've used cut even so for places where by coincidence the first couple of columns happened to be the same size, but that's really a hack.
Obviously, other people have different experiences which is why I quality it so. (I only narrowly missed it at the beginning, but I started in webdev, and we never quite took direct feeds from the mainframes.) But I don't think it's too crazy to say UNIX shell, to the extent it can be pinned down at all, works most natively with variable-length line-by-line content.
Obviously, other people have different experiences which is why I quality it so. (I only narrowly missed it at the beginning, but I started in webdev, and we never quite took direct feeds from the mainframes.) But I don't think it's too crazy to say UNIX shell, to the extent it can be pinned down at all, works most natively with variable-length line-by-line content.