On May 3, 2009, at 3:39 PM, AGSCalabrese wrote:

> What I am really after is a tutorial that describes string  
> operations.  I am teaching some students about strings.  I wanted to  
> find some tutorial that explained concatenation, string length,  
> getting a character at position "n", 8 bit and 16 bit characters,  
> capitalization and capitalization not.

As Steve said, you're better off looking for information on "text  
processing."  Perhaps even one of the older languages that specialized  
in text processing, like SNOBOL ?

The only other idea is to take several languages and compare their  
string primitives to look for commonalities and differences.  C is  
probably an awful choice, since it doesn't really have any string data  
type or operations built into it.  A lot of the early languages seem  
to ignore strings in favor of supporting algorithmic math. (Fortran,  
Pascal, etc.  I remember looking at Algol be being singularly  
unimpressed with it's string handling.)  BASIC may be one of the  
better thought-out examples of text processing in an early language   
(mind boggling though that may be), and a lot of more modern languages  
have followed its examples in their string libraries.

The wikipedia article looks like it has some nice formal definitions,  
but it's hardly beginner stuff ("Fixed length strings can be viewed as  
nodes on a hypercube" !  Reminds me of the reasons I was unimpressed  
with "computer science.")   The "programming" link looks more likely:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_functions_(programming)

BillW

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