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by donzog 1380 days ago
So true. The purpose of EDI/X12 was to be the single source of truth. It was okay while the military used it, as they would have stricter control over the standard, but once it was unleashed into the world of business...

There is not much point in it other than every customer is not starting from a plain slate but modifies the existing format to their needs and reuses the COBOL-style software to parse/generate the files. It's the path of least resistance.