The problem was described as “responses from SAP are slow.”

Have you ever seen prefixing zeroes in a Fiori application?

Some ABAP values have curious in-memory (and in-database) representations which are meant to be hidden from the user. The standard SAP user interface does this automatically, but the behavior of these values in external interfaces varies.

As I have previously written, ABAP has weak static types. This means that conversions between types are easy to do, even to the point that one can unintentionally do it.

I had taken arrays for granted until a programming class I attended had an exam question to the effect of “Why do programming languages have arrays?”

Even if you have not previously thought it through, the answer is fairly intuitive: arrays allow programs to generalize to inputs and problems of varying sizes.