[jhaywood]

I say it's not what people expect because everyone emphasizes the "fixed length" rather than "blank padded" nature of CHAR. CHAR is only actually a fixed length if you actually ensure that it is so yourself. That's possible but then you're just using a CHAR as a placeholder for those semantics not as something that naturally enforces them.

If you actually really really have fixed length fields then yes CHARs could be appropriate. But for many things even though you intend for them to be static length codes things change when you start having to interoperate with systems designed with different constraints. (For example after mergers or aquiring a competitor.) And I know that mainframes still exist but they aren't the use case in mind when many say "USE CHAR".

Also the database adapter that handles CHAR poorly is none other than JDBC on oracle http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5332845/oracle-jdbc-and-o... (Yes that is hilariously bad.) But the mysql way of always ignoring trailing whitespace is not standard in all databases.