Questions tagged [strings]
For questions about the implementation or design of strings within a programming language.
21 questions
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What are the considerations when modifying cases in a text?
By "cases" I mean uppercase, lowercase, and titlecase.
It seems many languages assumes that there is one-to-one correspondence of uppercase letters and lowercase letters, if the script that ...
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UTF-32 worth it for the string data type?
I've heard of Truffle strings from GraalVM which stores a string in one of multiple encodings, which might be perhaps like what Python (not CPython) uses for representing strings, though searching a ...
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How might I implement a `typeid` operator (returning the type of its argument as something, presumably as a string) in my compiler?
So, here is how strings work in my AEC-to-WebAssembly compiler. After the program is parsed, all strings except inline assembly ones are gathered in a C++ ...
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What was the first language to use backslashes as escape characters in string literals?
I assume that C didn't originate the idea that, for example, the sequence \t inside a string literal should mean a tab character, that ...
- 2,043
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Creating an interface for stringifying objects that allows loop detection
Suppose a language has a rust-style trait system but is garbage collected and most types are reference types by default.
I could create a trait like this:
...
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Why do programming languages use delimiters (quotes) for strings?
Almost every programming language requires strings (or char* or equivelent) to be marked with quotes. Few languages allow other delimiters, many languages allow ...
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Prior art on modeling characters of variable lengths
In some encodings such as UTF-8, characters are of variable length in bytes. It's a bit like a tagged union, but the exact size could be computed, so the next element in a string could follow ...
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In Python, why isn't it a syntax error when a list of strings is defined without comma separators?
When coding in Python, I found that defining a list of strings without separating the strings with a comma is not a syntax error. When running this code:
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To what degree is it practical to let objects be stored packed? [closed]
Let's say I want my compiler to store objects packed (data and collection members aligned to non-word boundaries).
Situation #1: I want to store an array of booleans.
A few languages already let the ...
- 1,485
6
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Why would Short String Optimization not apply to dynamic arrays?
Short string optimization is the optimization that sufficiently short strings have their data stored inline rather than an external buffer, so the string type ends up being a union. Swift does this, ...
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What are some different approaches to raw string syntax, and what are their pros and cons?
Many languages include a "raw string" literal type, intended for arbitrary (or as close as possible to arbitrary) strings of characters (and/or bytes), ignoring escape sequences and the like....
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How have modern language designs dealt with Unicode strings?
Languages developed over the last fifteen years or so have been within the era where Unicode is ubiquitous, and so could design their core string types accordingly. There are a lot of new issues that ...
- 15.3k
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Why do many dynamically typed languages identify types with strings?
I noticed in JavaScript and Lua, 'types' i.e., those returned by typeof()/type() are just identified by strings. As such we see ...
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What design trade-offs led to the "Norway problem" in YAML, and when are they worthwhile?
A well-known problem in YAML is a type-inference issue in parsing where a string is misinterpreted as a boolean. This is known as the "Norway problem", because it occurs when a field or ...
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What are the different syntax options for formatted string literals?
One option in Python is the f-string:
f"{a} {b} {c}"
Which is equivalent to:
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- 1,576