And writing encoding-agnostic string library is harder than we think, I guess. Notice that the first release of FORTRAN I is earlier than standardization of AS

And writing encoding-agnostic string library is harder than we think, I guess. Notice that the first release of FORTRAN I is earlier than standardization of ASCII. FORTRAN was initially born for IBM 704 then ported to huge variety of machine architectures. So there's no guarantee on internal string representation; It might be EBCDIC, ASCII, or other ancient, machine specific encodings.