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Hollerith constants, named in honor of Herman Hollerith, were used in early FORTRAN programs to allow manipulation of character data.
Early FORTRAN had no CHARACTER data type, only numeric types. In order to perform character manipulation, characters needed to be placed into numeric variables using Hollerith constants. For example, the constant 3HABC specified a three-character string "ABC", identified by the initial integer representing the string length 3 and the specified Hollerith character H, followed by the string data ABC. These constants were typeless, so that there were no type conversion issues. If the constant specified fewer characters than was possible to hold in a data item, the characters were then stored in the item left-justified and blank-filled.