Absolutely! I think it would be hard to come up with a more cumbersome, less efficient way of doing it than the original!

One disadvantage of your suggestion is that some space still needs to be wasted in padding the strings to 10 Characters each.
This also means that every string would have to be modified if you wanted to change to 12-character strings, or whatever.

Another disadvantage is that there is no way to do a runtime check for wrong-length strings - which would not be good for something intended to be manually edited by a non-programmer...

Not necessarily big deals, of course!