[SIGCIS-Members] query: history of character codes, Unicode?

[Ceruzzi, Paul]

Well, there was SNOBOL, which was a lanugage built up entirely out of the concept of the string.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL>.


Paul
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From: Members [members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org] on behalf of Mark J. Nelson [mjn at anadrome.org]
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2015 2:31 PM
To: members at lists.sigcis.org
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] query: history of character codes, Unicode?

Joris van Zundert <joris.van.zundert at huygens.knaw.nl> writes:

> I have been meaning to ask for a while now (after dabbling through
> some literature in vain) if anyone can point me to work on the
> invention, development, or emergence of the concept of the string.

I dug into this a bit some time ago, mostly focused on trying to trace
how the word "string" came to be ubiquitous in this context, to mean
something like "textual data type".

One line of influence is fairly easy to trace. In work on formal
languages (predating electronic computers), "string" was used with
roughly its normal English meaning in phrases such as "string of
symbols", interchangeably with similar ones like "sequence of
symbols". This work develops through the '50s and '60s in a pretty
direct line into the theory of formal grammars, and a whole host of
algorithms for doing various kinds of matching and processing on strings
of symbols (string parsing, string matching, string edit-distance,
etc.), with strings of character symbols usually being the most
important special case.

What's less clear to me is whether this is the only, or main, line of
development of the concept. There are also early uses of textual data
that at least in principle don't seem particularly connected to
formal-language theory, such as the text data fields in IBM's
batch-processing machines. Was the basic idea of just storing and
processing text on a computer *always* closely linked with the
formal-language concept of a string, and algorithmic work on
string-processing? From just reading things written in the '50s on text
processing (which seems to be the key period in this regard) the path of
influences there isn't entirely clear. I haven't found useful secondary
literature on that subject either, though I'd love pointers to it if it
exists.

-Mark

--
Mark J. Nelson
Anadrome Research
http://www.kmjn.org
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