I learned that people tend to understand better if you say "a string of characters". It still confuses people, but less so. I did this when explaining strings t

I learned that people tend to understand better if you say "a string of characters". It still confuses people, but less so. I did this when explaining strings to intro-to-programming students; they don't get things right away, so it helps to include some redundancy in your words. Actually, that's not a bad lesson for communicating in general.