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Timeline for What's a string?

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Sep 9, 2023 at 18:00 comment added Kai Burghardt For the record: Pascal as published in the year 1970 (was never named “Original Pascal”) does not have a string data type. You can specify string literals as arguments to write/writeLn but that’s about it. This was one of the early points of criticism. It was Turbo Pascal, a dialect of Pascal, that introduced the string data type you describe. Borland created various other string data types yet never adopted the ISO standard 10206 string schema.
Apr 13, 2022 at 20:02 comment added Jonathan Allan Redirecting observers to vote on: codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8963/53748
Apr 13, 2022 at 12:17 comment added Jonathan Allan ...actually not Jelly - in Jelly a string type does not exist, only lists of characters (except for when a long-standing, and sometimes used, interpreter bug with multiplication forces some to exist).
Apr 13, 2022 at 12:07 comment added Jonathan Allan I've only just realised (from codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/246190/53748) that this is often being used to allow a list of single character strings in languages that do have a string type (Python, Jelly, O5AB1E, etc.). I'm not sure if this was the intention, should we update this post to allow that (a retrospective fit), add a new answer, or start to disallow it under this answer? (Bearing in mind that this already has +24/-0 of which we do not know how many considered this fact.)
Jul 18, 2016 at 15:33 history edited DJMcMayhem CC BY-SA 3.0
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Apr 23, 2016 at 9:09 comment added Level River St @cat as explained in above, in Pascal the string was at the machine level an array of bytes, and the length of the string is stored in the first byte s[0]. Back in those days 1 character = 1 byte. The Pascal system had the disadvantage that string length was limited to 255. C on the other hand had no length limit on strings, but had the disadvantage that a string could not contain a byte of value 0 as this marked the end of the string. Also, findng the length of the string was less computationally expensive in Pascal than C. Since then Pascal has expanded and C has evolved into C++ and C#
Apr 23, 2016 at 1:41 comment added cat Pascal has a String type which has a maximum length of 255 What? Can't Pascal count higher than 8 bits??
Mar 12, 2015 at 17:39 vote accept Geobits
Mar 12, 2015 at 18:54
Oct 4, 2014 at 0:49 comment added Mooing Duck Careful, C++ doesn't have a String class, it has a std::string class.
Sep 19, 2014 at 21:44 history edited Level River St CC BY-SA 3.0
added 44 characters in body
Sep 19, 2014 at 17:54 history answered Level River St CC BY-SA 3.0