> >> I have googled around and have not found a webpage explaining
> >> the data type "string" without referring to a programming language.
> >> Can someone point me to a URL that describes strings and useful
> >> operations on strings in the abstract without referring to a specific
> >> language ?
> >>
> >> Gus Calabrese
> >
> > String handling is always language dependent, as there are different
> > ways of representing them, and
> > different sets of standard operations.
> >
> Of course string handling is language dependent, but just as you can
> discuss
> sorting algorithms independent of a language, you should be able to
> discuss
> string handling independent of a language.
> Gus


A string is a finite sequence of characters, whether is "ABC" or the
contents or 'War & Peace'.

In general there's really not much you can do with a string, you can check
its length, add bits, remove bits or search for bits within it.  Shouldn't
take too long to explain.

Knuth - Art of Programming has all of this stuff, although, as other have
said, it mainly explains it in the context of a programming language.

I'm not sure how useful strings outside of programming are...

Even BASIC got a bit complicated with strings.  For a long time one
character equalled a byte, now with Unicode that's not the case.  In VB,
Len("ABC") will state that string has 3 characters, but LenB("ABC") may
return 3 or 6, depending on how many bytes are used to represent a
character.

Tony

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