fixed-width

For example, a dot is very important in code, and it has the same width as other characters in a fixed-width font.

You can optimize slicing on codepoint boundaries by storing strings internally in a fixed-width representation, like Python does.

It looks much more natural in fixed-width fonts too, using quotes like that here kind of defeats the purpose.

In fixed-width font every character has the same width.

With fixed-width records, writing the extra nulls may be important for data privacy reasons and in any case, it allows comparison using memcpy(3), diff(1), and checksums.

The code appears to be presented in a mix of fixed-width, proportional, italic, bold, and sans-serif fonts, with a bit of colour thrown in.

I remember the feeling of liberation when we got rid of dial-up, but there were still plenty of seconds-long load times just to see the main content--only to find it scrunched between two fixed-width sidebars (arranged in a table).

Here's an example where disabling user zoom vastly improves user experience: a tool I built for myself with the purpose of allowing me to test other websites responsively at different widths while using a device with a fixed-width screen.

Justified text really only looks good if either (a) you have correct hyphenation and a high-quality paragraph composition algorithm, such as the one used by TeX or Adobe InDesign, or (b) you lay the text out by hand very carefully for a fixed-width layout.

A desire to move beyond those systems was part of what made the web work, and the first step was moving the web to graphical systems capable of displaying more than formatted fixed-width text on a VT100 terminal like some of the parents above think it was about.

This is because they are either implemented as a) a centered, fixed-width column that invokes horizontal scroll bars for those whose preferred size is smaller than required by the layout (usually no less than 850 pixels these days), or b) fixed margins so that, e.g., a 640 pixel wide viewport on a page with 200+ pixel margins reduces the effective column width to less than 250 pixels.

In a fixed-width type, you need at least 21 bits to represent that, which is why 32 bits is the most common form for representing any arbitrary code point; but if you don't mind the alignment issues, you could even pack it to 24 bits or even 21 bits if you don't mind a little bit twiddling to extract it.

Because of this, the evident purpose of strncpy is to fill fixed-width text fields in "old school" fixed-field database records.

Fixed-width representations are a less-than-perfect-but-still-not-entirely-unreasonable engineering solution to this problem.