Why String?

[RefugeeFromSlashDot]

Then there are people like me who never heard of it pronounced that way until we read it here. In the DEC world it seemed be pronounced A-dollar. A% was pronounced A-percent on those rare times when one couldn't tell from the context whether we meant an integer or floating-point variable. Perhaps it's an architecture difference; those of us who started in the mini world vs. those who started in the micro world.

[BrainiacV]

I guess it is time for this grizzled olde tyme programmer to edjumacate the youngin's. Back when core (ya know, that pre-RAM stuff) was still being strung by hand and was measured in single digit K's (you know what a K is doncha? --a millionth of a gigabyte, or thereabouts...) To teach the programmers who had just emerged from the primordial slime about a sequence of characters instead of the pure numbers that they were used to, they came up with the idea of describing them as akin to beads strung on a "string". "A whale of a tale, and it's all true, I swear by my tattoo."

Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.

[spencepk]

Too bad it doesn't come in 55-gallon drums :(

[PhilLenoir]

Funny that, both the VIC-20 and BBC Micro manuals used exactly that convention. I guess that it depends which BASIC you learned and from which course or manual. These varieties of BASIC only read the first two characters of variable names, although you could make your code more readable using more.

Life is like a s**t sandwich; the more bread you have, the less s**t you eat.

[Dominic Amann]

Because a string denotes a sequence of arbitrary characters, whereas text connotes readable language of some kind.

[PhilLenoir]

Numbers aren't strings of digits but "Strings" are strings of characters. Base numeric data types are all of fixed size, but text data always had the problem of being of indeterminate length and required a terminator (as in C), a size and data (as in Pascal) or padded fixed length (early databases).

Life is like a s**t sandwich; the more bread you have, the less s**t you eat.

[DarkTizzy]

Absolutely A-String FTW! Although I much prefer G$. :cool:

[User 8102478]

Has to do with the internal representation. A string is an array of char. A number (int, float etc) is a 4-64 byte binary. A string is typically though of as variable length, whereas a number is a definite size. To look at a number as a sequence of digits, you are actually converting from a binary representation to a string. That sequence of digits is a sequence of char, which is to say its actually a string.

[User 8230845]

I've been programming since 1979 and that is always how I heard it pronounced "A-Sting" I also to this day call the $ a String and the ! a Bang etc.

[aojepojefpoejafpeoj]

Right, because assign(int, int) or creating a wrapper for string named EmployeeId is much better.

[Member 8348554]

Why a duck? brian

[Kythen]

You know what makes that even more amusing? You're actually correct! The ancient Inca used knotted strings called quipu[^] as a sort of calculator. :cool:

[MSBassSinger]

Sounds like string theory. :)

[jeramyRR]

I thought it was called String because we are "stringing" along characters. Since it's really an array of single characters, that makes sense to me.

[fred_]

NOT WORK SAFE

[Ralph Little]

Perhaps it is a US thing. I cut my programming teeth on a Vic20 and it was always A-dollar. I've never heard the A-string version in my entire 30 year experience in the industry (not that I would have heard either version in the last 25 of them, of course :D )

[Ralph Little]

I would have thought they you people would have COTTONED on to how tiresome this THREAD is becoming. :D

[Indrora]

AspDotNetDev wrote:

I was just thinking that it seems a bit odd that "string" is so commonly used by programmers to refer to some text. I would think "text" would be more appropriate.

you have to take into consideration the fact that string refers to a very specific thing, depending on the language:

• A sequence of chars, terminated in a NULL(0x00)
• A sequence of chars, pre-pended with their length as a uint8(This is how Pascal and .NET BinaryReaders do it)
• A fixed-width space that is assumed to have character data in it (MySQL VARCHAR)
• an N-Length columnar space containing character data (SQLite's TEXT field)
• a String literal, in C* defined as a sequence of characters wrapped in '"'.
• a Verbatim String in C#, allowing for '\n' and other punctuation to be preserved.
• A descriptive element attached to an object (Z-Code/Inform)

String, I feel, is used to encompass more of an idea, since "text" is ambiguous (is it a certain length? A certain kind? UTF?

AspDotNetDev wrote:

If we are using "string" just because it refers to a string of characters (aka, a sequence of characters), then why not also call numbers "strings" (as they are strings/sequences of digits and some other characters)?

Because ints aren't strings of numbers. Sure, in TCL and a few other languages, things are natively strings, but that counts only for convencience (and in the case of TCL, efficiency). In C* languages (this includes Java, Python, etc), int and float are stashed as their binary values -- the value 128 isn't stored as "128" -- its as 0x80. If we did store them as chars, think of how much memory it would take to store the Uint64 maximum value: 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (thanks, MSDN!). That's 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF in hex, a much, much smaller value in-memory.

---- "Pinky, are you thinking what im thinking?" "I Dunno brain, how many licks DOES it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop?" "You want me to calculate that? or should we take over the world?" "ooh! OooooOOOooH! lets find out!"

[Harley L Pebley]

A couple theories on StackOverflow[^] The two prevailing ones indicate it's either from typography or mathematics.

[George Grimes]

To add to the old-timers theory, I started programming in 1976 on my job. The first language was an assembler for a minicomputer and then Fortran. After that, I started to college working on my E.E. degree and they forced me to take one semester each of Basic and Fortran (again). By that time I was learning both Pascal and C at work so my exposure to Basic didn't do me too much harm. You can count me as another programmer (still programming for a living) who did not start with the Basic language. I also never heard A$ pronounced A-string until I read this thread. I also never considered Basic to have given birth to the concept of the terminology. I'll see if I can did out some of my old books and find any references to strings that predate Basic.