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I am writing an l-system evaluator, and have explained the concept to non-programmer friends of mine several times now. I've found myself explaining the concept
by dmkolobov 5y ago
I am writing an l-system evaluator, and have explained the concept to non-programmer friends of mine several times now. I've found myself explaining the concept of "strings" over and over, so I've switched to calling it "text" in those situations.
As a reasonably experienced programmer, however, this terminology makes me uncomfortable. To me, "text" implies a sequence of words written in a human language, rather than a sequence of arbitrary characters. It hints at structure which may not be present in a string.
- chriswarbo 5y agoI like the distinction made by Haskell: - A Byte (AKA Word8) is 8 bits. It has no inherent meaning. - A Character (AKA Char) is a Unicode code point. - A ByteString is a sequence of Bytes. It has no inherent meaning. - A Text (AKA String) is a sequence of Chars. In particular, Char != Byte and String != ByteString; we can juggle bytes without having to care about encodings; and we can manipulate text without having to care about its representation.
- dmkolobov 5y agoDefinitely appreciate how careful Haskell is about the distinction: it's where I first started having these thoughts!