Strings Revisited

“Ten, nine, Ignition Sequence Start, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero. We have a light off! Lift off…”,

Strings (of Text) are everywhere. Used widely in writing. To tell stories, share ideas, and much more. In programming, a text string, also known as a string or simply as text, is a group of characters that are used as data.

History Scholars generally agree that the earliest form of writing appeared almost 5,500 years agoin Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). Strings have been with us for the better part of our recent history—think of it as it pertains to the build-up in the ubiquity of computer hardware and software today.

Textual Data is used in many places. Consider secure communication over the webusing SSL Certificates.

For a browser on the web, the process looks like this:

 

1. A browser attempts to connect to a website (i.e., a web server) secured with SSL.
2. The browser requests that the web server identifies itself.
3. The web server sends the browser or server a copy of its SSL certificate in the response.
4. The browser checks to see whether it trusts the SSL certificate. If it does, it signals this to the web server.
5. The web server then returns a digitally signed acknowledgment to start an SSL-encrypted session.
6. Encrypted data is shared between the browser and the web server.

 

Broadly, an SSL certificate would contain information like,

issuer_name
  country= kenya
  Organization = acme
Validity
  Not Before = Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT
  ...
    ...

Strings are useful in interfaces where machines take input from humans or where machines need to communicate information to end users. Strings can present as emails, visual queues to information held in computers, navigation elements that project the meaning of underlying data. This data might be other forms of data such as numbers or even sounds, and other visual artifacts such as images and videos.

In systems design, it is imperative that communication projected to the user of a program or other programs be concise and adhere to a set of pre-agreed-upon requirements. It is also important that the language of the problem domain be used to communicate meaning clearly.

“Strings are very useful when communicating information from the program to the userof the program. They are less useful when storing information for the computer to use”.

Since all textual data is a sequence of characters, there's a need to define what makes texts different. Lightly put, there is a difference between an email address and a person's name—both texts with distinct requirements.

Remember when information is transmitted through various media, often, given factors such as entropy: meaning, and context might be lost. Imagine getting a bad reading in court.

Some links:

 

Wikipedia Python ms-sql matlab java javascript