The ever-enticing search for the ideal programming language produced this 1997 article from Sergey Polak. Although somewhat dated, I liked the article's comments about strings:
The discussion of arrays also brings to mind the subject of strings. No matter what anyone says, it is my firm belief that any language, regardless of its purpose, must have a powerful and flexible string-handling facility built-in. A program is very rare if it has no need for string handling, and I myself have had to write a great deal of programs, both at work and for my own uses, that depended heavily on strings. Some languages put strings in as an afterthought, and others put in some very basic features and leave the rest to library routines. That just can not be. The text string is a fundamentally important data type and can not be ignored, nor can it be relegated to blatant impersonation by some other type, such as array of characters. A string data type is required in a good language.
The very popular language C, and C++ as well, have horrendous string-handling facilities. Not only is the programmer required to declare his strings as character arrays, but there simply is no way to deal with strings as entities in the language.
Ouch. So true. That is not to endorse the specific string implementation recommendation from the article. (I have previously commented about implementation ideas, including communication buffers.)
Do the man a favor and save the article to disk for offline reading so as to minimize his bandwidth hits.
P.S. You're welcome, Ehud. I'll now be Internet-disabled for a week.
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