Anyone want to tackle - string (small version of rope), string (general chain of various things), string (music), etc. - not just the computer version.
Also, string theory of cosmology/physics.
The first paragraph seems too "busy" to me. What about replacing it with something like this?
- A string (or string of characters) is a data type used in most programming languages to represent text, and is the focus of this article.
- The computing term string is also used in a broader sense to group a sequence of entities; for example, tokens in a language grammar, or a sequence of states in automata. See the theory of computation.
This is a lot better. Also, I think the usage in computing theory could be expanded in its own paragraph: one starts with a finite alphabet, then considers all finite sequences consisting of letters from that alphabet (including the empty string) and defines concatentation of strings. The set of string with concatentation is then a
monoid.
I think I wrote most the current paragraph and I agree your rewrite is better. Just do it! --
drj
Ok, I'll move my text to the main article. I won't try to expand the second paragraph; I'm inclined to leave that to the
computation article, or to whoever can concisely expand it without detracting from the rest of the page. --
loh