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 ________________________________________ From: Members [members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] on behalf of Mark J. Nelson [mjn@anadrome.org] Sent: Friday, August 21, 2015 2:31 PM To: members@lists.sigcis.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] query: history of character codes, Unicode? Joris van Zundert <joris.van.zundert@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 _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org