OpenEuphoria

Re: String?

• Posted by Rolf Schröder <rolf at rschr.de> May 31, 2004
• 679 views

Juergen Luethje wrote:
> 
> Rolf wrote:
> ...
> > As I know, a character is a byte that represents a human readable or
> > printable symbol. A character string (synonymous: string) is a series of
> > characters. i.e., a series of bytes representing human readable|printable
> > symbols (words, sentences,...).
> 
> Again: I never heard or read, that the definition of "character" or
> "string" depends on the question, whether or not something is printable.
> E.g. in BASIC, this is clearly *not* the case. You might also want to
> look here:
>    <a
>    href="http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?characters">http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?characters</a>
>    <a
>    href="http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?string">http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?string</a>
>

Jürgen,

I see just that stated there what I said, may be with different words.
I got this (computer related) definition from: "Dictionary of Computer
Terms" (Webster's) and also from "Computer & Internet Dictionary"
(Random House).

What is a character for you then (computer related)?

Later you wrote:
 
> Like him, you are missing the point.
> Using such a user-defined string type doesn't solve the problem: If a
> Euphoria program reads e.g. {74,111,104,110} from a file, there is no way
> to find out, whether this sequence  means "John", or the weight of the
> members of my family, or whatever.

That's true, specially if a fith byte woul be a zero!
Excuse me, but now I think YOU are missing the point: the decision, if you
want to print it as an ASCII string or if you want to print simply the
numbers, the decision comes by selection the 'tool' YOU select: format {%s}
in printf() gives you the text, and i.e. format {%d,%d,%d,%d} in printf 
would give you the plain numbers.

Sincerely, Rolf