
Why is Text referred to as a String in programming? - max_
In all programming languages I have used, Text content is referred to as a &quot;String&quot;.<p>a) Is there any programming language that refers to strings as something else?<p>b) Why are they called so? I however found a resource (I am not satisfied by it)  http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;880195&#x2F;the-history-behind-the-definition-of-a-string<p>Disclaimer: I am a <i>newbie</i> coder!!
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brudgers
Text and strings are two different things that can overlap.

In computer science strings are sequences of characters. Characters are
members of a set called an alphabet. A string gets fed into a state machine
(such as a Turing machine) and the machine accepts or rejects that string and
potentially creates some side effects which may or may not be useful or
interesting.

Text is something humans use to communicate with each other (when the text is
not jibberish). Texts can also have a relationship with alphabets but in
ordinary language we say it such text has letters which ordinary people
outside of computing don't usually refer to as characters. Some texts don't
have a relationship to an alphabet, e.g. those written hieroglyphic languages.

A sometimes more useful description of the sort of thing that English texts
and hieroglyphic texts have in common is graphemes. And the fact that texts
can use graphemes rather than characters is what makes translating strings
expressing content in one language to another language non-trivial and more
human knowledge than clever algorithms.

Perl 6 is a language that attempts to capture some of the nuance of the
differences between human language and automata theory.

[https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/day-7-unicode-p...](https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/day-7-unicode-
perl-6-and-you/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory)

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crobin
A more complete answer exists in that stackexchange:
[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/43329/etymolo...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/43329/etymology-
of-string)

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lanna
Because it refers to characters stringed together

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lovelearning
Perhaps a metaphor based on the strings of beads in an abacus? I'm just
speculating.

