A rope stores a long string as a collection (binary tree) of shorter strings. Strings are stored contiguously in memory, so mutation (insertion, deletion, caten

A rope stores a long string as a collection (binary tree) of shorter strings. Strings are stored contiguously in memory, so mutation (insertion, deletion, catenation, etc) often involves much copying of data, which could be problematic with long strings. Ropes avoid this problem, but have some additional code complexity and resource overhead associated with data fragmentation.