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The Media Control Interface — MCI for short — is a high-level API developed by Microsoft and IBM for controlling multimedia peripherals connected to a Microsoft Windows or OS/2 computer, such as CD-ROM players and audio controllers.

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97-545: MCI makes it very simple to write a program which can play a wide variety of media files and even to record sound by just passing commands as strings . It uses relations described in Windows registries or in the [MCI] section of the file system.ini . One advantage of this API is that MCI commands can be transmitted both from the programming language and from the scripting language (open script, lingo aso). Example of such commands are mciSendCommand or mciSendString . After

194-415: A cumulative hierarchy of sets. New Foundations takes a different approach; it allows objects such as the set of all sets at the cost of restrictions on its set-existence axioms. The system of Kripke–Platek set theory is closely related to generalized recursion theory. Two famous statements in set theory are the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis . The axiom of choice, first stated by Zermelo,

291-500: A literal constant or as some kind of variable . The latter may allow its elements to be mutated and the length changed, or it may be fixed (after creation). A string is generally considered as a data type and is often implemented as an array data structure of bytes (or words ) that stores a sequence of elements, typically characters, using some character encoding . String may also denote more general arrays or other sequence (or list ) data types and structures. Depending on

388-433: 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

485-414: 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

582-453: 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

679-462: 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

776-434: A correspondence between syntax and semantics in first-order logic. Gödel used the completeness theorem to prove the compactness theorem , demonstrating the finitary nature of first-order logical consequence . These results helped establish first-order logic as the dominant logic used by mathematicians. In 1931, Gödel published On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems , which proved

873-533: 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

970-430: A definition of the real numbers in terms of Dedekind cuts of rational numbers, a definition still employed in contemporary texts. Georg Cantor developed the fundamental concepts of infinite set theory. His early results developed the theory of cardinality and proved that the reals and the natural numbers have different cardinalities. Over the next twenty years, Cantor developed a theory of transfinite numbers in

1067-561: A different characterization, which lacked the formal logical character of Peano's axioms. Dedekind's work, however, proved theorems inaccessible in Peano's system, including the uniqueness of the set of natural numbers (up to isomorphism) and the recursive definitions of addition and multiplication from the successor function and mathematical induction. In the mid-19th century, flaws in Euclid's axioms for geometry became known. In addition to

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1164-523: A few years, the MCI interface has been phased out in favor of the DirectX APIs first released in 1995. The Media Control Interface consists of 7 parts: Each of these so-called MCI devices (e.g. CD-ROM or VCD player) can play a certain type of files, e.g. AVIVideo plays .avi files, CDAudio plays CD-DA tracks among others. Other MCI devices have also been made available over time. To play

1261-400: A finitistic system together with a principle of transfinite induction . Gentzen's result introduced the ideas of cut elimination and proof-theoretic ordinals , which became key tools in proof theory. Gödel gave a different consistency proof, which reduces the consistency of classical arithmetic to that of intuitionistic arithmetic in higher types. The first textbook on symbolic logic for

1358-414: 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

1455-415: A formalized mathematical statement, whether the statement is true or false. Ernst Zermelo gave a proof that every set could be well-ordered , a result Georg Cantor had been unable to obtain. To achieve the proof, Zermelo introduced the axiom of choice , which drew heated debate and research among mathematicians and the pioneers of set theory. The immediate criticism of the method led Zermelo to publish

1552-430: A foundational system for mathematics, independent of set theory. These foundations use toposes , which resemble generalized models of set theory that may employ classical or nonclassical logic. Mathematical logic emerged in the mid-19th century as a subfield of mathematics, reflecting the confluence of two traditions: formal philosophical logic and mathematics. Mathematical logic, also called 'logistic', 'symbolic logic',

1649-524: A foundational theory for mathematics. Fraenkel proved that the axiom of choice cannot be proved from the axioms of Zermelo's set theory with urelements . Later work by Paul Cohen showed that the addition of urelements is not needed, and the axiom of choice is unprovable in ZF. Cohen's proof developed the method of forcing , which is now an important tool for establishing independence results in set theory. Leopold Löwenheim and Thoralf Skolem obtained

1746-494: A function as a rule for computation, or a smooth graph, were no longer adequate. Weierstrass began to advocate the arithmetization of analysis , which sought to axiomatize analysis using properties of the natural numbers. The modern (ε, δ)-definition of limit and continuous functions was already developed by Bolzano in 1817, but remained relatively unknown. Cauchy in 1821 defined continuity in terms of infinitesimals (see Cours d'Analyse, page 34). In 1858, Dedekind proposed

1843-462: 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

1940-449: 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

2037-561: A model, or in other words that an inconsistent set of formulas must have a finite inconsistent subset. The completeness and compactness theorems allow for sophisticated analysis of logical consequence in first-order logic and the development of model theory , and they are a key reason for the prominence of first-order logic in mathematics. Gödel's incompleteness theorems establish additional limits on first-order axiomatizations. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any consistent, effectively given (defined below) logical system that

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2134-403: A new concept – the computable function – had been discovered, and that this definition was robust enough to admit numerous independent characterizations. In his work on the incompleteness theorems in 1931, Gödel lacked a rigorous concept of an effective formal system; he immediately realized that the new definitions of computability could be used for this purpose, allowing him to state

2231-468: 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

2328-489: A particular sentence is true in every model that satisfies a particular set of axioms, then there must be a finite deduction of the sentence from the axioms. The compactness theorem first appeared as a lemma in Gödel's proof of the completeness theorem, and it took many years before logicians grasped its significance and began to apply it routinely. It says that a set of sentences has a model if and only if every finite subset has

2425-422: A portion of set theory directly in their semantics. The most well studied infinitary logic is L ω 1 , ω {\displaystyle L_{\omega _{1},\omega }} . In this logic, quantifiers may only be nested to finite depths, as in first-order logic, but formulas may have finite or countably infinite conjunctions and disjunctions within them. Thus, for example, it

2522-542: 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

2619-491: A second exposition of his result, directly addressing criticisms of his proof. This paper led to the general acceptance of the axiom of choice in the mathematics community. Skepticism about the axiom of choice was reinforced by recently discovered paradoxes in naive set theory . Cesare Burali-Forti was the first to state a paradox: the Burali-Forti paradox shows that the collection of all ordinal numbers cannot form

2716-423: A separate domain for each higher-type quantifier to range over, the quantifiers instead range over all objects of the appropriate type. The logics studied before the development of first-order logic, for example Frege's logic, had similar set-theoretic aspects. Although higher-order logics are more expressive, allowing complete axiomatizations of structures such as the natural numbers, they do not satisfy analogues of

2813-478: 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

2910-426: 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

3007-404: A series of publications. In 1891, he published a new proof of the uncountability of the real numbers that introduced the diagonal argument , and used this method to prove Cantor's theorem that no set can have the same cardinality as its powerset . Cantor believed that every set could be well-ordered , but was unable to produce a proof for this result, leaving it as an open problem in 1895. In

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3104-457: A set. Very soon thereafter, Bertrand Russell discovered Russell's paradox in 1901, and Jules Richard discovered Richard's paradox . Zermelo provided the first set of axioms for set theory. These axioms, together with the additional axiom of replacement proposed by Abraham Fraenkel , are now called Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (ZF). Zermelo's axioms incorporated the principle of limitation of size to avoid Russell's paradox. In 1910,

3201-405: 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

3298-437: 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

3395-501: 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

3492-402: 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

3589-404: 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.

3686-571: A stronger limitation than the one established by the Löwenheim–Skolem theorem. The second incompleteness theorem states that no sufficiently strong, consistent, effective axiom system for arithmetic can prove its own consistency, which has been interpreted to show that Hilbert's program cannot be reached. Many logics besides first-order logic are studied. These include infinitary logics , which allow for formulas to provide an infinite amount of information, and higher-order logics , which include

3783-497: 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,

3880-477: 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

3977-418: A type of media, it needs to be initialized correctly using MCI commands. These commands are subdivided into categories: A full list of MCI commands can be found at Microsoft's MSDN Library . This Microsoft Windows article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . String (computer science) In computer programming , a string is traditionally a sequence of characters , either as

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4074-443: A work generally considered as marking a turning point in the history of logic. Frege's work remained obscure, however, until Bertrand Russell began to promote it near the turn of the century. The two-dimensional notation Frege developed was never widely adopted and is unused in contemporary texts. From 1890 to 1905, Ernst Schröder published Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik in three volumes. This work summarized and extended

4171-581: Is computable ; this is not true in classical theories of arithmetic such as Peano arithmetic . Algebraic logic uses the methods of abstract algebra to study the semantics of formal logics. A fundamental example is the use of Boolean algebras to represent truth values in classical propositional logic, and the use of Heyting algebras to represent truth values in intuitionistic propositional logic. Stronger logics, such as first-order logic and higher-order logic, are studied using more complicated algebraic structures such as cylindric algebras . Set theory

4268-517: Is a particular formal system of logic . Its syntax involves only finite expressions as well-formed formulas , while its semantics are characterized by the limitation of all quantifiers to a fixed domain of discourse . Early results from formal logic established limitations of first-order logic. The Löwenheim–Skolem theorem (1919) showed that if a set of sentences in a countable first-order language has an infinite model then it has at least one model of each infinite cardinality. This shows that it

4365-461: Is also included as part of mathematical logic. Each area has a distinct focus, although many techniques and results are shared among multiple areas. The borderlines amongst these fields, and the lines separating mathematical logic and other fields of mathematics, are not always sharp. Gödel's incompleteness theorem marks not only a milestone in recursion theory and proof theory, but has also led to Löb's theorem in modal logic. The method of forcing

4462-453: Is capable of interpreting arithmetic, there exists a statement that is true (in the sense that it holds for the natural numbers) but not provable within that logical system (and which indeed may fail in some non-standard models of arithmetic which may be consistent with the logical system). For example, in every logical system capable of expressing the Peano axioms , the Gödel sentence holds for

4559-417: 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

4656-470: Is employed in set theory, model theory, and recursion theory, as well as in the study of intuitionistic mathematics. The mathematical field of category theory uses many formal axiomatic methods, and includes the study of categorical logic , but category theory is not ordinarily considered a subfield of mathematical logic. Because of its applicability in diverse fields of mathematics, mathematicians including Saunders Mac Lane have proposed category theory as

4753-468: Is impossible for a set of first-order axioms to characterize the natural numbers, the real numbers, or any other infinite structure up to isomorphism . As the goal of early foundational studies was to produce axiomatic theories for all parts of mathematics, this limitation was particularly stark. Gödel's completeness theorem established the equivalence between semantic and syntactic definitions of logical consequence in first-order logic. It shows that if

4850-425: 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

4947-446: Is possible to say that an object is a whole number using a formula of L ω 1 , ω {\displaystyle L_{\omega _{1},\omega }} such as Higher-order logics allow for quantification not only of elements of the domain of discourse , but subsets of the domain of discourse, sets of such subsets, and other objects of higher type. The semantics are defined so that, rather than having

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5044-642: Is the study of sets , which are abstract collections of objects. Many of the basic notions, such as ordinal and cardinal numbers, were developed informally by Cantor before formal axiomatizations of set theory were developed. The first such axiomatization , due to Zermelo, was extended slightly to become Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (ZF), which is now the most widely used foundational theory for mathematics. Other formalizations of set theory have been proposed, including von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory (NBG), Morse–Kelley set theory (MK), and New Foundations (NF). Of these, ZF, NBG, and MK are similar in describing

5141-512: 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

5238-500: The Löwenheim–Skolem theorem , which says that first-order logic cannot control the cardinalities of infinite structures. Skolem realized that this theorem would apply to first-order formalizations of set theory, and that it implies any such formalization has a countable model . This counterintuitive fact became known as Skolem's paradox . In his doctoral thesis, Kurt Gödel proved the completeness theorem , which establishes

5335-511: 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

5432-409: The natural numbers . Giuseppe Peano published a set of axioms for arithmetic that came to bear his name ( Peano axioms ), using a variation of the logical system of Boole and Schröder but adding quantifiers. Peano was unaware of Frege's work at the time. Around the same time Richard Dedekind showed that the natural numbers are uniquely characterized by their induction properties. Dedekind proposed

5529-466: The ' algebra of logic ', and, more recently, simply 'formal logic', is the set of logical theories elaborated in the course of the nineteenth century with the aid of an artificial notation and a rigorously deductive method. Before this emergence, logic was studied with rhetoric , with calculationes , through the syllogism , and with philosophy . The first half of the 20th century saw an explosion of fundamental results, accompanied by vigorous debate over

5626-433: 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

5723-435: 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

5820-469: The collection is nonempty, the lack of a general, concrete rule by which the choice can be made renders the axiom nonconstructive. Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski showed that the axiom of choice can be used to decompose a solid ball into a finite number of pieces which can then be rearranged, with no scaling, to make two solid balls of the original size. This theorem, known as the Banach–Tarski paradox ,

5917-608: The completeness and compactness theorems from first-order logic, and are thus less amenable to proof-theoretic analysis. Another type of logics are fixed-point logic s that allow inductive definitions , like one writes for primitive recursive functions . One can formally define an extension of first-order logic — a notion which encompasses all logics in this section because they behave like first-order logic in certain fundamental ways, but does not encompass all logics in general, e.g. it does not encompass intuitionistic, modal or fuzzy logic . Lindström's theorem implies that

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6014-428: 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

6111-412: The consistency of elementary arithmetic, respectively; the tenth was to produce a method that could decide whether a multivariate polynomial equation over the integers has a solution. Subsequent work to resolve these problems shaped the direction of mathematical logic, as did the effort to resolve Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem , posed in 1928. This problem asked for a procedure that would decide, given

6208-679: The context of proof theory. At its core, mathematical logic deals with mathematical concepts expressed using formal logical systems . These systems, though they differ in many details, share the common property of considering only expressions in a fixed formal language . The systems of propositional logic and first-order logic are the most widely studied today, because of their applicability to foundations of mathematics and because of their desirable proof-theoretic properties. Stronger classical logics such as second-order logic or infinitary logic are also studied, along with Non-classical logics such as intuitionistic logic . First-order logic

6305-581: The development of axiomatic frameworks for geometry , arithmetic , and analysis . In the early 20th century it was shaped by David Hilbert 's program to prove the consistency of foundational theories. Results of Kurt Gödel , Gerhard Gentzen , and others provided partial resolution to the program, and clarified the issues involved in proving consistency. Work in set theory showed that almost all ordinary mathematics can be formalized in terms of sets, although there are some theorems that cannot be proven in common axiom systems for set theory. Contemporary work in

6402-407: The early decades of the 20th century, the main areas of study were set theory and formal logic. The discovery of paradoxes in informal set theory caused some to wonder whether mathematics itself is inconsistent, and to look for proofs of consistency. In 1900, Hilbert posed a famous list of 23 problems for the next century. The first two of these were to resolve the continuum hypothesis and prove

6499-450: The first volume of Principia Mathematica by Russell and Alfred North Whitehead was published. This seminal work developed the theory of functions and cardinality in a completely formal framework of type theory , which Russell and Whitehead developed in an effort to avoid the paradoxes. Principia Mathematica is considered one of the most influential works of the 20th century, although the framework of type theory did not prove popular as

6596-507: 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 ,

6693-441: The foundations of mathematics often focuses on establishing which parts of mathematics can be formalized in particular formal systems (as in reverse mathematics ) rather than trying to find theories in which all of mathematics can be developed. The Handbook of Mathematical Logic in 1977 makes a rough division of contemporary mathematical logic into four areas: Additionally, sometimes the field of computational complexity theory

6790-628: The foundations of mathematics. Theories of logic were developed in many cultures in history, including China , India , Greece and the Islamic world . Greek methods, particularly Aristotelian logic (or term logic) as found in the Organon , found wide application and acceptance in Western science and mathematics for millennia. The Stoics , especially Chrysippus , began the development of predicate logic . In 18th-century Europe, attempts to treat

6887-430: 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

6984-423: The importance of the incompleteness theorem for some time. Gödel's theorem shows that a consistency proof of any sufficiently strong, effective axiom system cannot be obtained in the system itself, if the system is consistent, nor in any weaker system. This leaves open the possibility of consistency proofs that cannot be formalized within the system they consider. Gentzen proved the consistency of arithmetic using

7081-443: The incompleteness (in a different meaning of the word) of all sufficiently strong, effective first-order theories. This result, known as Gödel's incompleteness theorem , establishes severe limitations on axiomatic foundations for mathematics, striking a strong blow to Hilbert's program. It showed the impossibility of providing a consistency proof of arithmetic within any formal theory of arithmetic. Hilbert, however, did not acknowledge

7178-491: The incompleteness theorems in generality that could only be implied in the original paper. Numerous results in recursion theory were obtained in the 1940s by Stephen Cole Kleene and Emil Leon Post . Kleene introduced the concepts of relative computability, foreshadowed by Turing, and the arithmetical hierarchy . Kleene later generalized recursion theory to higher-order functionals. Kleene and Georg Kreisel studied formal versions of intuitionistic mathematics, particularly in

7275-601: The independence of the parallel postulate , established by Nikolai Lobachevsky in 1826, mathematicians discovered that certain theorems taken for granted by Euclid were not in fact provable from his axioms. Among these is the theorem that a line contains at least two points, or that circles of the same radius whose centers are separated by that radius must intersect. Hilbert developed a complete set of axioms for geometry , building on previous work by Pasch. The success in axiomatizing geometry motivated Hilbert to seek complete axiomatizations of other areas of mathematics, such as

7372-428: 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

7469-575: The layman was written by Lewis Carroll , author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , in 1896. Alfred Tarski developed the basics of model theory . Beginning in 1935, a group of prominent mathematicians collaborated under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki to publish Éléments de mathématique , a series of encyclopedic mathematics texts. These texts, written in an austere and axiomatic style, emphasized rigorous presentation and set-theoretic foundations. Terminology coined by these texts, such as

7566-407: 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

7663-436: 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

7760-411: The mathematical properties of formal systems of logic such as their expressive or deductive power. However, it can also include uses of logic to characterize correct mathematical reasoning or to establish foundations of mathematics . Since its inception, mathematical logic has both contributed to and been motivated by the study of foundations of mathematics. This study began in the late 19th century with

7857-445: The natural numbers and the real line . This would prove to be a major area of research in the first half of the 20th century. The 19th century saw great advances in the theory of real analysis , including theories of convergence of functions and Fourier series . Mathematicians such as Karl Weierstrass began to construct functions that stretched intuition, such as nowhere-differentiable continuous functions . Previous conceptions of

7954-482: The natural numbers but cannot be proved. Here a logical system is said to be effectively given if it is possible to decide, given any formula in the language of the system, whether the formula is an axiom, and one which can express the Peano axioms is called "sufficiently strong." When applied to first-order logic, the first incompleteness theorem implies that any sufficiently strong, consistent, effective first-order theory has models that are not elementarily equivalent ,

8051-486: The only extension of first-order logic satisfying both the compactness theorem and the downward Löwenheim–Skolem theorem is first-order logic. Modal logics include additional modal operators, such as an operator which states that a particular formula is not only true, but necessarily true. Although modal logic is not often used to axiomatize mathematics, it has been used to study the properties of first-order provability and set-theoretic forcing. Intuitionistic logic

8148-418: The operations of formal logic in a symbolic or algebraic way had been made by philosophical mathematicians including Leibniz and Lambert , but their labors remained isolated and little known. In the middle of the nineteenth century, George Boole and then Augustus De Morgan presented systematic mathematical treatments of logic. Their work, building on work by algebraists such as George Peacock , extended

8245-451: 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

8342-479: 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 ,

8439-434: 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

8536-497: 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

8633-499: 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

8730-407: 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

8827-530: The traditional Aristotelian doctrine of logic into a sufficient framework for the study of foundations of mathematics . In 1847, Vatroslav Bertić made substantial work on algebraization of logic, independently from Boole. Charles Sanders Peirce later built upon the work of Boole to develop a logical system for relations and quantifiers, which he published in several papers from 1870 to 1885. Gottlob Frege presented an independent development of logic with quantifiers in his Begriffsschrift , published in 1879,

8924-777: 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

9021-463: The words bijection , injection , and surjection , and the set-theoretic foundations the texts employed, were widely adopted throughout mathematics. The study of computability came to be known as recursion theory or computability theory , because early formalizations by Gödel and Kleene relied on recursive definitions of functions. When these definitions were shown equivalent to Turing's formalization involving Turing machines , it became clear that

9118-399: The work of Boole, De Morgan, and Peirce, and was a comprehensive reference to symbolic logic as it was understood at the end of the 19th century. Concerns that mathematics had not been built on a proper foundation led to the development of axiomatic systems for fundamental areas of mathematics such as arithmetic, analysis, and geometry. In logic, the term arithmetic refers to the theory of

9215-456: 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: Symbolic logic Mathematical logic is the study of formal logic within mathematics . Major subareas include model theory , proof theory , set theory , and recursion theory (also known as computability theory). Research in mathematical logic commonly addresses

9312-486: Was developed by Heyting to study Brouwer's program of intuitionism, in which Brouwer himself avoided formalization. Intuitionistic logic specifically does not include the law of the excluded middle , which states that each sentence is either true or its negation is true. Kleene's work with the proof theory of intuitionistic logic showed that constructive information can be recovered from intuitionistic proofs. For example, any provably total function in intuitionistic arithmetic

9409-407: Was proved independent of ZF by Fraenkel, but has come to be widely accepted by mathematicians. It states that given a collection of nonempty sets there is a single set C that contains exactly one element from each set in the collection. The set C is said to "choose" one element from each set in the collection. While the ability to make such a choice is considered obvious by some, since each set in

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