Computing desk
< September 1	<< Aug \| September \| Oct >>	September 3 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

September 2

Who named the string?

Who invented the name String? Was it used in mathematics to refer to finite ordered lists of symbols before it became the name of a datatype? Staecker (talk) 18:23, 2 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

According to this thread on Another Site, it was first so named by Victor Yngve in his 1958 paper A Programming Language for Mechanical Translation. Tevildo (talk) 19:55, 2 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It may go back much further - Axel Thue is known for writing one of the first papers in formal language theory. This [1] paper gives a translation of Thue's 1914 paper that uses the English word "string". This [2] is a translation of some other Thue papers that also uses "string". I suspect the original papers may have used the German word for string, but I can't read German. A freely accessible 1909 paper of Thus is available here in original German [3] if anyone wants to see if any stringy German words are in it. I'm pretty sure the computer science term "string" was just taken directly from the same usage in math and formal language. SemanticMantis (talk) 20:25, 2 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The linked paper in German has got nothing to do with formal language, its about approximating algebraic numbers. The 1914 paper [4] though references a 1906 paper of Thue with the German title "Über unendliche Zeichen-reihen." Zeichenreihen would be the word that translates into String, although its literal translation would just be 'row of symbols'. So, whoever first referenced Thue in an english language publication and decided that String would be a better translation of Zeichenreihe? 81.146.63.239 (talk) 22:10, 2 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oops! I guess I made the faulty assumption that since the 1906 and 1914 papers had do do with what we now call strings and formal language, that the 1909 paper would too. Thanks for clarifying and the further links below! SemanticMantis (talk) 23:43, 2 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Here [5] is someone refering to Thue's Zeichenreihe as a 'String' in 1947. Surely there are earlier examples. 81.146.63.239 (talk) 22:21, 2 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

And here [6] is a 1944 paper by the same author (Emil Post) that uses 'String' to refer to a sequence of symbols. 'String' in quotation marks (possibly indicating that it is a first use of the term). 81.146.63.239 (talk) 23:09, 2 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

In the OED Online—which includes updates for the Oxford English Dictionary#Third edition as they are published—the oldest cite for "string" as used in "math, etc." to mean "a sequence of symbols or linguistic elements in a definite order" is 1932 when C. I. Lewis and C. H. Langford wrote in Symbolic Logic: "Propositions are not strings of marks, or series of sounds, except incidentally." Without further context it's possible that this isn't really the technical usage in question but just the colloquial use of "string" to mean a sequence of things; but the next cite, dated 1940, clearly is the technical usage: W. V. Quine wrote in Mathematical Logic: "Now x is a string of accents, symbolically Ac x, if every initial segment of x ends in an accent." --65.94.50.17 (talk) 03:27, 3 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Incidentally, note that 1932 was the year after Kurt Gödel published his famous incompleteness theorem, which he proved by precisely the technique that Lewis and Langford are denying: he treated a proposition as a string of marks. I don't know, but I have to suspect that they wrote that passage with the intention of repudiating his proof. --65.94.50.17 (talk) 23:21, 3 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]