Strings are an interesting datatype because they are fundamental to many pieces of software, but represented differently by practically every single programming language. Strings can have a high overhead to support language interoperability because there is invariably so much copying involved.
FORTRAN 77 and 90 support for strings is limited to a predetermined buffer size. Since the results of a string assignment into that buffer in FORTRAN does not propagate the length of the string, trailing whitespace is always trimmed for any string begin passed out from a FORTRAN implementation.