strings and character sequences?

[Duthomhas]

Incubbus, you do realize that you have completely derailed the OP's question with meaningless nonsense?

You are getting huffy over your own head. Take a university course on theory of computation before you start telling people what "string" means. Further, the contents of the set are irrelevant to terminology.


To the OP's question, in addition to Albatross's and idbentley's good answers, the string class makes working with c-strings more convenient. However, there are times when all you want is the underlying, unadorned character sequence.

More advanced uses depend on doing tricky things, where you can manipulate the c-strings in ways that are more efficient in very special circumstances. This requires some careful programming though...

[bigearsbilly]

I think the OP has passed away.

one generally needs char * for C std library.

[m4ster r0shi]

helios wrote:

Can you name a character sequence that can't be interpreted as a string?

Now that I look at it again, this is a (surprisingly :D) clever question. Truth is that given a character sequence and a meaning, you can create (not with a unique way) a context within which that particular character sequence has that particular meaning.

So, instead of saying:

A string is a character sequence that has some meaning in a linguistic context.

I should probably have said:

A string is a character sequence that has some meaning in a linguistic context that is widely accepted (but not necessarily widely used).