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77-541: Alphabetical order is a system whereby character strings are placed in order based on the position of the characters in the conventional ordering of an alphabet . It is one of the methods of collation . In mathematics, a lexicographical order is the generalization of the alphabetical order to other data types, such as sequences of numbers or other ordered mathematical objects . When applied to strings or sequences that may contain digits, numbers or more elaborate types of elements, in addition to alphabetical characters,

154-433: A "array of characters" which may be stored in the same array but is often not null terminated. Using C string handling functions on such an array of characters often seems to work, but later leads to security problems . There are many algorithms for processing strings, each with various trade-offs. Competing algorithms can be analyzed with respect to run time, storage requirements, and so forth. The name stringology

231-414: A 10-byte buffer , along with its ASCII (or more modern UTF-8 ) representation as 8-bit hexadecimal numbers is: The length of the string in the above example, " FRANK ", is 5 characters, but it occupies 6 bytes. Characters after the terminator do not form part of the representation; they may be either part of other data or just garbage. (Strings of this form are sometimes called ASCIZ strings , after

308-453: A byte value in the ASCII range will represent only that ASCII character, making the encoding safe for systems that use those characters as field separators. Other encodings such as ISO-2022 and Shift-JIS do not make such guarantees, making matching on byte codes unsafe. These encodings also were not "self-synchronizing", so that locating character boundaries required backing up to the start of

385-409: A computer collation algorithm is complex, and simple attempts will fail. For example, unless the algorithm has at its disposal an extensive list of family names, there is no way to decide if "Gillian Lucille van der Waal" is "van der Waal, Gillian Lucille", "Waal, Gillian Lucille van der", or even "Lucille van der Waal, Gillian". Ordering by surname is frequently encountered in academic contexts. Within

462-462: A consequence, some people call such a string a Pascal string or P-string . Storing the string length as byte limits the maximum string length to 255. To avoid such limitations, improved implementations of P-strings use 16-, 32-, or 64-bit words to store the string length. When the length field covers the address space , strings are limited only by the available memory . If the length is bounded, then it can be encoded in constant space, typically

539-533: A dedicated string datatype at all, instead adopting the convention of representing strings as lists of character codes. Even in programming languages having a dedicated string type, string can usually be iterated as a sequence character codes, like lists of integers or other values. Representations of strings depend heavily on the choice of character repertoire and the method of character encoding. Older string implementations were designed to work with repertoire and encoding defined by ASCII, or more recent extensions like

616-581: A few cases, such as Arabic and Kiowa , the alphabet has been completely reordered. Alphabetization rules applied in various languages are listed below. Collation algorithms (in combination with sorting algorithms ) are used in computer programming to place strings in alphabetical order. A standard example is the Unicode Collation Algorithm , which can be used to put strings containing any Unicode symbols into (an extension of) alphabetical order. It can be made to conform to most of

693-414: A fixed length. A few languages such as Haskell implement them as linked lists instead. A lot of high-level languages provide strings as a primitive data type, such as JavaScript and PHP , while most others provide them as a composite data type, some with special language support in writing literals, for example, Java and C# . Some languages, such as C , Prolog and Erlang , avoid implementing

770-462: A length code are limited to the maximum value of the length code. Both of these limitations can be overcome by clever programming. It is possible to create data structures and functions that manipulate them that do not have the problems associated with character termination and can in principle overcome length code bounds. It is also possible to optimize the string represented using techniques from run length encoding (replacing repeated characters by

847-449: A machine word, thus leading to an implicit data structure , taking n + k space, where k is the number of characters in a word (8 for 8-bit ASCII on a 64-bit machine, 1 for 32-bit UTF-32/UCS-4 on a 32-bit machine, etc.). If the length is not bounded, encoding a length n takes log( n ) space (see fixed-length code ), so length-prefixed strings are a succinct data structure , encoding a string of length n in log( n ) + n space. In

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924-468: A one 8-bit byte per-character encoding) for reasonable representation. The normal solutions involved keeping single-byte representations for ASCII and using two-byte representations for CJK ideographs . Use of these with existing code led to problems with matching and cutting of strings, the severity of which depended on how the character encoding was designed. Some encodings such as the EUC family guarantee that

1001-471: A position is reached where one string has no more letters to compare while the other does, then the first (shorter) string is deemed to come first in alphabetical order. Capital or upper case letters are generally considered to be identical to their corresponding lower case letters for the purposes of alphabetical ordering, although conventions may be adopted to handle situations where two strings differ only in capitalization. Various conventions also exist for

1078-542: A program treated specially (such as period and space and comma) were in the same place in all the encodings a program would encounter. These character sets were typically based on ASCII or EBCDIC . If text in one encoding was displayed on a system using a different encoding, text was often mangled , though often somewhat readable and some computer users learned to read the mangled text. Logographic languages such as Chinese , Japanese , and Korean (known collectively as CJK ) need far more than 256 characters (the limit of

1155-478: A separate integer (which may put another artificial limit on the length) or implicitly through a termination character, usually a character value with all bits zero such as in C programming language. See also " Null-terminated " below. String datatypes have historically allocated one byte per character, and, although the exact character set varied by region, character encodings were similar enough that programmers could often get away with ignoring this, since characters

1232-426: A sequence of data or computer records other than characters — like a "string of bits " — but when used without qualification it refers to strings of characters. Use of the word "string" to mean any items arranged in a line, series or succession dates back centuries. In 19th-Century typesetting, compositors used the term "string" to denote a length of type printed on paper; the string would be measured to determine

1309-405: A single long consecutive array of characters, a typical text editor instead uses an alternative representation as its sequence data structure—a gap buffer , a linked list of lines, a piece table , or a rope —which makes certain string operations, such as insertions, deletions, and undoing previous edits, more efficient. The differing memory layout and storage requirements of strings can affect

1386-489: A single multi-author paper, ordering the authors alphabetically by surname, rather than by other methods such as reverse seniority or subjective degree of contribution to the paper, is seen as a way of "acknowledg[ing] similar contributions" or "avoid[ing] disharmony in collaborating groups". The practice in certain fields of ordering citations in bibliographies by the surnames of their authors has been found to create bias in favour of authors with surnames which appear earlier in

1463-437: A string datatype; such a meta-string is called a literal or string literal . Although formal strings can have an arbitrary finite length, the length of strings in real languages is often constrained to an artificial maximum. In general, there are two types of string datatypes: fixed-length strings , which have a fixed maximum length to be determined at compile time and which use the same amount of memory whether this maximum

1540-501: A string is a finite sequence of symbols that are chosen from a set called an alphabet . A primary purpose of strings is to store human-readable text, like words and sentences. Strings are used to communicate information from a computer program to the user of the program. A program may also accept string input from its user. Further, strings may store data expressed as characters yet not intended for human reading. Example strings and their purposes: The term string may also designate

1617-402: A string, and pasting two strings together could result in corruption of the second string. Unicode has simplified the picture somewhat. Most programming languages now have a datatype for Unicode strings. Unicode's preferred byte stream format UTF-8 is designed not to have the problems described above for older multibyte encodings. UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 require the programmer to know that

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1694-404: A string-specific datatype, depending on the needs of the application, the desire of the programmer, and the capabilities of the programming language being used. If the programming language's string implementation is not 8-bit clean , data corruption may ensue. C programmers draw a sharp distinction between a "string", aka a "string of characters", which by definition is always null terminated, vs.

1771-497: A termination value. Most string implementations are very similar to variable-length arrays with the entries storing the character codes of corresponding characters. The principal difference is that, with certain encodings, a single logical character may take up more than one entry in the array. This happens for example with UTF-8, where single codes ( UCS code points) can take anywhere from one to four bytes, and single characters can take an arbitrary number of codes. In these cases,

1848-477: A text file that is both human-readable and intended for consumption by a machine. This is needed in, for example, source code of programming languages, or in configuration files. In this case, the NUL character does not work well as a terminator since it is normally invisible (non-printable) and is difficult to input via a keyboard. Storing the string length would also be inconvenient as manual computation and tracking of

1925-491: A version of alphabetical order that can be achieved using a very simple algorithm , based purely on the ASCII or Unicode codes for characters. This may have non-standard effects such as placing all capital letters before lower-case ones. See ASCIIbetical order . A rhyming dictionary is based on sorting words in alphabetical order starting from the last to the first letter of the word. Character string Depending on

2002-443: Is Active Frequentative . The verbal pattern itpa'al is Passive Frequentative . The verbal pattern aphel is Active Causative . The verbal pattern itaphal is Passive Causative . The language has received considerable scholarly attention, as shown in the bibliography below. However, the majority of those who are familiar with it, namely Orthodox Jewish students of Talmud, are given no systematic instruction in

2079-449: Is r , which comes after e (the fourth letter of Aster ) in the alphabet. Those words themselves are ordered based on their sixth letters ( l , n and p respectively). Then comes At , which differs from the preceding words in the second letter ( t comes after s ). Ataman comes after At for the same reason that Aster came after As . Attack follows Ataman based on comparison of their third letters, and Baa comes after all of

2156-417: Is commonly referred to as a C string . This representation of an n -character string takes n + 1 space (1 for the terminator), and is thus an implicit data structure . In terminated strings, the terminating code is not an allowable character in any string. Strings with length field do not have this limitation and can also store arbitrary binary data . An example of a null-terminated string stored in

2233-425: Is needed or not, and variable-length strings , whose length is not arbitrarily fixed and which can use varying amounts of memory depending on the actual requirements at run time (see Memory management ). Most strings in modern programming languages are variable-length strings. Of course, even variable-length strings are limited in length – by the size of available computer memory . The string length can be stored as

2310-499: Is thought to have created the world's first library catalog , known as the Pinakes , with scrolls shelved in alphabetical order of the first letter of authors' names. In the 1st century BC, Roman writer Varro compiled alphabetic lists of authors and titles. In the 2nd century CE, Sextus Pompeius Festus wrote an encyclopedic epitome of the works of Verrius Flaccus , De verborum significatu , with entries in alphabetic order. In

2387-729: Is uncertain, and has to be reconstructed with the help of these kindred dialects and of the reading tradition of the Yemenite Jews , and where available those of the Iraqi , Syrian and Egyptian Jews . The value of the Yemenite reading tradition has been challenged by Matthew Morgenstern . (The vocalized Aramaic texts with which Jews are familiar, from the Bible and the prayer book , are of limited usefulness for this purpose, as they are in different dialects.) Talmudic Aramaic bears all

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2464-512: The ISO 8859 series. Modern implementations often use the extensive repertoire defined by Unicode along with a variety of complex encodings such as UTF-8 and UTF-16. The term byte string usually indicates a general-purpose string of bytes, rather than strings of only (readable) characters, strings of bits, or such. Byte strings often imply that bytes can take any value and any data can be stored as-is, meaning that there should be no value interpreted as

2541-511: The SNOBOL language of the early 1960s. A string datatype is a datatype modeled on the idea of a formal string. Strings are such an important and useful datatype that they are implemented in nearly every programming language . In some languages they are available as primitive types and in others as composite types . The syntax of most high-level programming languages allows for a string, usually quoted in some way, to represent an instance of

2618-523: The 3rd century CE, Harpocration wrote a Homeric lexicon alphabetized by all letters. The 10th century saw major alphabetical lexicons of Greek (the Suda ), Arabic ( Ibn Faris 's al-Mujmal fī al-Lugha ), and Biblical Hebrew ( Menahem ben Saruq 's Mahberet ). Alphabetical order as an aid to consultation flourished in 11th-century Italy, which contributed works on Latin ( Papias 's Elementarium ) and Talmudic Aramaic ( Nathan ben Jehiel 's Arukh ). In

2695-639: The 7th–6th centuries BCE. In the Book of Jeremiah , the prophet utilizes the Atbash substitution cipher , based on alphabetical order. Similarly, biblical authors used acrostics based on the (ordered) Hebrew alphabet . The first effective use of alphabetical order as a cataloging device among scholars may have been in ancient Alexandria, in the Great Library of Alexandria , which was founded around 300 BCE. The poet and scholar Callimachus , who worked there,

2772-677: The Danish king Christian IX comes after his predecessor Christian VIII . Languages which use an extended Latin alphabet generally have their own conventions for treatment of the extra letters. Also in some languages certain digraphs are treated as single letters for collation purposes. For example, the Spanish alphabet treats ñ as a basic letter following n , and formerly treated the digraphs ch and ll as basic letters following c and l , respectively. Now ch and ll are alphabetized as two-letter combinations. The new alphabetization rule

2849-420: The alphabet, while this effect does not appear in fields in which bibliographies are ordered chronologically. If a phrase begins with a very common word (such as "the", "a" or "an", called articles in grammar), that word is sometimes ignored or moved to the end of the phrase, but this is not always the case. For example, the book " The Shining " might be treated as "Shining", or "Shining, The" and therefore before

2926-404: The alphabetical order is generally called a lexicographical order . To determine which of two strings of characters comes first when arranging in alphabetical order, their first letters are compared. If they differ, then the string whose first letter comes earlier in the alphabet comes before the other string. If the first letters are the same, then the second letters are compared, and so on. If

3003-433: The assignment of the seventh bit to (for example) handle ASCII codes. Early microcomputer software relied upon the fact that ASCII codes do not use the high-order bit, and set it to indicate the end of a string. It must be reset to 0 prior to output. The length of a string can also be stored explicitly, for example by prefixing the string with the length as a byte value. This convention is used in many Pascal dialects; as

3080-602: The book title " Summer of Sam ". However, it may also be treated as simply "The Shining" and after "Summer of Sam". Similarly, " A Wrinkle in Time " might be treated as "Wrinkle in Time", "Wrinkle in Time, A", or "A Wrinkle in Time". All three alphabetization methods are fairly easy to create by algorithm, but many programs rely on simple lexicographic ordering instead. The prefixes M and Mc in Irish and Scottish surnames are abbreviations for Mac and are sometimes alphabetized as if

3157-435: The character value and a length) and Hamming encoding . While these representations are common, others are possible. Using ropes makes certain string operations, such as insertions, deletions, and concatenations more efficient. The core data structure in a text editor is the one that manages the string (sequence of characters) that represents the current state of the file being edited. While that state could be stored in

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3234-428: The compositor's pay. Use of the word "string" to mean "a sequence of symbols or linguistic elements in a definite order" emerged from mathematics, symbolic logic , and linguistic theory to speak about the formal behavior of symbolic systems, setting aside the symbols' meaning. For example, logician C. I. Lewis wrote in 1918: A mathematical system is any set of strings of recognisable marks in which some of

3311-410: The first monolingual English dictionary , "Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with (a) then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with (v) looke towards the end". Although as late as 1803 Samuel Taylor Coleridge condemned encyclopedias with "an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters", many lists are today based on this principle. The standard order of

3388-507: The fixed-size code units are different from the "characters", the main difficulty currently is incorrectly designed APIs that attempt to hide this difference (UTF-32 does make code points fixed-sized, but these are not "characters" due to composing codes). Some languages, such as C++ , Perl and Ruby , normally allow the contents of a string to be changed after it has been created; these are termed mutable strings. In other languages, such as Java , JavaScript , Lua , Python , and Go ,

3465-498: The form Pa'el (פַּעֵל) “like to do”, are all in the active voice. But the form Itpe'el (אִתְפְּעֵל), the form Itaph'al (אִתַפְעַל) and the form Itpa'al (אִתְפַּעַל) are essentially reflexive and usually function in a passive sense. The Aramaic verb has two participles : an active participle with suffix and a passive participle with suffix : |} The verbal pattern (binyan) pa‘el are frequentative verbs showing repeated or intense action. The verbal pattern pa'el

3542-447: The handling of strings containing spaces , modified letters, such as those with diacritics , and non-letter characters such as marks of punctuation . The result of placing a set of words or strings in alphabetical order is that all of the strings beginning with the same letter are grouped together; within that grouping all words beginning with the same two-letter sequence are grouped together; and so on. The system thus tends to maximize

3619-430: The implementation is usually hidden , the string must be accessed and modified through member functions. text is a pointer to a dynamically allocated memory area, which might be expanded as needed. See also string (C++) . Both character termination and length codes limit strings: For example, C character arrays that contain null (NUL) characters cannot be handled directly by C string library functions: Strings using

3696-579: The language of the Babylonian Talmud (which was completed in the seventh century), the Targum Onqelos , and of post-Talmudic ( Gaonic ) literature, which are the most important cultural products of Babylonian Jews . The most important epigraphic sources for the dialect are the hundreds of inscriptions on incantation bowls . The language was closely related to other Eastern Aramaic dialects such as Mandaic . Its original pronunciation

3773-583: The language-specific conventions described above by tailoring its default collation table. Several such tailorings are collected in Common Locale Data Repository . The principle behind alphabetical ordering can still be applied in languages that do not strictly speaking use an alphabet – for example, they may be written using a syllabary or abugida – provided the symbols used have an established ordering. For logographic writing systems, such as Chinese hanzi or Japanese kanji ,

3850-428: The latter case, the length-prefix field itself does not have fixed length, therefore the actual string data needs to be moved when the string grows such that the length field needs to be increased. Here is a Pascal string stored in a 10-byte buffer, along with its ASCII / UTF-8 representation: Many languages, including object-oriented ones, implement strings as records with an internal structure like: However, since

3927-407: The length is tedious and error-prone. Two common representations are: While character strings are very common uses of strings, a string in computer science may refer generically to any sequence of homogeneously typed data. A bit string or byte string , for example, may be used to represent non-textual binary data retrieved from a communications medium. This data may or may not be represented by

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4004-411: The letters of the alphabet. Another method is for numbers to be sorted alphabetically as they would be spelled: for example 1776 would be sorted as if spelled out "seventeen seventy-six", and 24 heures du Mans as if spelled "vingt-quatre..." (French for "twenty-four"). When numerals or other symbols are used as special graphical forms of letters, as 1337 for leet or the movie Seven (which

4081-509: The letters were separate—"æther" and "aether" would be ordered the same relative to all other words. This is true even when the ligature is not purely stylistic, such as in loanwords and brand names. Special rules may need to be adopted to sort strings which vary only by whether two letters are joined by a ligature. When some of the strings contain numerals (or other non-letter characters), various approaches are possible. Sometimes such characters are treated as if they came before or after all

4158-436: The logical length of the string (number of characters) differs from the physical length of the array (number of bytes in use). UTF-32 avoids the first part of the problem. The length of a string can be stored implicitly by using a special terminating character; often this is the null character (NUL), which has all bits zero, a convention used and perpetuated by the popular C programming language . Hence, this representation

4235-562: The marks of being a specialist language of study and legal argumentation, like Law French , rather than a vernacular mother tongue, and continued in use for these purposes long after Judeo-Arabic had become the languages of daily life. It has developed a battery of technical logical terms, such as tiyuvta (conclusive refutation) and tiqu (undecidable moot point), which are still used in Jewish legal writings, including those in other languages, and have influenced modern Hebrew . Like

4312-462: The method of radical-and-stroke sorting is frequently used as a way of defining an ordering on the symbols. Japanese sometimes uses pronunciation order, most commonly with the Gojūon order but sometimes with the older Iroha ordering. In mathematics, lexicographical order is a means of ordering sequences in a manner analogous to that used to produce alphabetical order. Some computer applications use

4389-399: The modern ISO basic Latin alphabet is: An example of straightforward alphabetical ordering follows: Another example: The above words are ordered alphabetically. As comes before Aster because they begin with the same two letters and As has no more letters after that whereas Aster does. The next three words come after Aster because their fourth letter (the first one that differs)

4466-416: The number of common initial letters between adjacent words. Alphabetical order was first used in the 1st millennium BCE by Northwest Semitic scribes using the abjad system. However, a range of other methods of classifying and ordering material, including geographical, chronological , hierarchical and by category , were preferred over alphabetical order for centuries. Parts of the Bible are dated to

4543-451: The original assembly language directive used to declare them.) Using a special byte other than null for terminating strings has historically appeared in both hardware and software, though sometimes with a value that was also a printing character. $ was used by many assembler systems, : used by CDC systems (this character had a value of zero), and the ZX80 used " since this was

4620-551: The other Judeo-Aramaic languages , it was written in the Hebrew alphabet . May his great name shall be blessed (Kaddish Shalem, 8th century) ַ ני ‎ נַטְרַנִי ‎ he supervised me נֵיעָרְבִינְהוּ וְנִכְתְּבִינְהוּ There are six major verb stems or verbal patterns (binyanim) in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. The form pe‘al (פְּעַל) “to do”, the form Aph'el (אַפְעֵל) “let do”, and

4697-422: The others because it has a different first letter. When some of the strings being ordered consist of more than one word, i.e., they contain spaces or other separators such as hyphens , then two basic approaches may be taken. In the first approach, all strings are ordered initially according to their first word, as in the sequence: In the second approach, strings are alphabetized as if they had no spaces, giving

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4774-479: The programming language and precise data type used, a variable declared to be a string may either cause storage in memory to be statically allocated for a predetermined maximum length or employ dynamic allocation to allow it to hold a variable number of elements. When a string appears literally in source code , it is known as a string literal or an anonymous string. In formal languages , which are used in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science ,

4851-693: The same as the base letter for alphabetical ordering purposes. For example, rôle comes between rock and rose , as if it were written role . However, languages that use such letters systematically generally have their own ordering rules. See § Language-specific conventions below. In most cultures where family names are written after given names , it is still desired to sort lists of names (as in telephone directories) by family name first. In this case, names need to be reordered to be sorted correctly. For example, Juan Hernandes and Brian O'Leary should be sorted as "Hernandes, Juan" and "O'Leary, Brian" even if they are not written this way. Capturing this rule in

4928-589: The second half of the 12th century, Christian preachers adopted alphabetical tools to analyse biblical vocabulary. This led to the compilation of alphabetical concordances of the Bible by the Dominican friars in Paris in the 13th century, under Hugh of Saint Cher . Older reference works such as St. Jerome 's Interpretations of Hebrew Names were alphabetized for ease of consultation. The use of alphabetical order

5005-434: The security of the program accessing the string data. String representations requiring a terminating character are commonly susceptible to buffer overflow problems if the terminating character is not present, caused by a coding error or an attacker deliberately altering the data. String representations adopting a separate length field are also susceptible if the length can be manipulated. In such cases, program code accessing

5082-440: The sequence: The second approach is the one usually taken in dictionaries, and it is thus often called dictionary order by publishers . The first approach has often been used in book indexes , although each publisher traditionally set its own standards for which approach to use therein; there was no ISO standard for book indexes ( ISO 999 ) before 1975. In French, modified letters (such as those with diacritics ) are treated

5159-457: The spelling is Mac in full. Thus McKinley might be listed before Mackintosh (as it would be if it had been spelled out as "MacKinley"). Since the advent of computer-sorted lists, this type of alphabetization is less frequently encountered, though it is still used in British telephone directories. The prefix St or St. is an abbreviation of "Saint", and is traditionally alphabetized as if

5236-518: The spelling is Saint in full. Thus in a gazetteer St John's might be listed before Salem (as if it would be if it had been spelled out as "Saint John's"). Since the advent of computer-sorted lists, this type of alphabetization is less frequently encountered, though it is still sometimes used. Ligatures (two or more letters merged into one symbol) which are not considered distinct letters, such as Æ and Œ in English, are typically collated as if

5313-497: The string data requires bounds checking to ensure that it does not inadvertently access or change data outside of the string memory limits. String data is frequently obtained from user input to a program. As such, it is the responsibility of the program to validate the string to ensure that it represents the expected format. Performing limited or no validation of user input can cause a program to be vulnerable to code injection attacks. Sometimes, strings need to be embedded inside

5390-499: The string delimiter in its BASIC language. Somewhat similar, "data processing" machines like the IBM 1401 used a special word mark bit to delimit strings at the left, where the operation would start at the right. This bit had to be clear in all other parts of the string. This meant that, while the IBM 1401 had a seven-bit word, almost no-one ever thought to use this as a feature, and override

5467-407: The strings are taken initially and the remainder derived from these by operations performed according to rules which are independent of any meaning assigned to the marks. That a system should consist of 'marks' instead of sounds or odours is immaterial. According to Jean E. Sammet , "the first realistic string handling and pattern matching language" for computers was COMIT in the 1950s, followed by

5544-777: The value is fixed and a new string must be created if any alteration is to be made; these are termed immutable strings. Some of these languages with immutable strings also provide another type that is mutable, such as Java and .NET 's StringBuilder , the thread-safe Java StringBuffer , and the Cocoa NSMutableString . There are both advantages and disadvantages to immutability: although immutable strings may require inefficiently creating many copies, they are simpler and completely thread-safe . Strings are typically implemented as arrays of bytes, characters, or code units, in order to allow fast access to individual units or substrings—including characters when they have

5621-494: Was coined in 1984 by computer scientist Zvi Galil for the theory of algorithms and data structures used for string processing. Some categories of algorithms include: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Jewish Babylonian Aramaic ( Aramaic : ארמית Ārāmît ) was the form of Middle Aramaic employed by writers in Lower Mesopotamia between the fourth and eleventh centuries. It is most commonly identified with

5698-436: Was initially resisted by scholars, who expected their students to master their area of study according to its own rational structures; its success was driven by such tools as Robert Kilwardby 's index to the works of St. Augustine , which helped readers access the full original text instead of depending on the compilations of excerpts which had become prominent in 12th century scholasticism . The adoption of alphabetical order

5775-476: Was issued by the Royal Spanish Academy in 1994. These digraphs were still formally designated as letters but they are no longer so since 2010. On the other hand, the digraph rr follows rqu as expected (and did so even before the 1994 alphabetization rule), while vowels with acute accents ( á, é, í, ó, ú ) have always been ordered in parallel with their base letters, as has the letter ü . In

5852-530: Was part of the transition from the primacy of memory to that of written works. The idea of ordering information by the order of the alphabet also met resistance from the compilers of encyclopaedias in the 12th and 13th centuries, who were all devout churchmen. They preferred to organise their material theologically – in the order of God's creation, starting with Deus (meaning God). In 1604 Robert Cawdrey had to explain in Table Alphabeticall ,

5929-509: Was stylised as Se7en ), they may be sorted as if they were those letters. Natural sort order orders strings alphabetically, except that multi-digit numbers are treated as a single character and ordered by the value of the number encoded by the digits. In the case of monarchs and popes , although their numbers are in Roman numerals and resemble letters, they are normally arranged in numerical order: so, for example, even though V comes after I,

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