The History Behind the Definition of a 'String'

Question

I have never thought about until recently, but I\'m not sure why we call strings strings. I am a .NET programmer, but I believe the concept of strings exist in

Answer 1

The earliest reference I could find in computing is from March 1963's METEOR: A LISP Interpreter for String Transformations by Daniel G. Bobrow at MIT's AI Labs.

However, definition 15d. in the Oxford English Dictionary is:

Computing A linear sequence of records or data.

... and with a first quotation from a 1956 Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery:

Areas are set aside for shuttling strings of control fields back and forth until a completely sorted sequence is obtained.

This use naturally follows on from definition 15c.:

Math., etc. A sequence of symbols or linguistic elements in a definite order.

... and first used in Clarence Irving Lewis and Cooper Harold Langford's Symbolic Logic (1932):

Propositions are not strings of marks, or series of sounds, except incidentally.

This in turn follows on from many other, much earlier definitions for things in a line.

Answer 2

My assumption has always been that the programming term originated from the following definition of the word "string" (from Merriam-Webster):

(1): a series of things arranged in or as if in a line <a string of cars> <a string of names>

(2): a sequence of like items (as bits, characters, or words)

Since a string in programming is simply an ordered sequence of characters, referring to this as a "string of characters" (or simply "string") seems like the most probable origin.

Answer 3

In a talk about Javascript history Douglas Crockford says "Nobody knows" and gives a few alternatives: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO1Wnu-xKoY#t=2989

I found the report which in it, allegedly, there is the first reference ever in computer history to a series of characters as a "string". I think it's at the top right column of page 4 of the pdf, which is numbered 47:

http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~bchandra/courses/papers/Naure_Algol60.pdf

Answer 4

It's called a strings, because it's actually an array of char type elements.

That being said, they are "stringing together" (or is it strung together) via this array, which turns them into a "string".