Re: Integer & String vs Number & Text

Text certainly is more straight forward than "Sequence" in the mainline. But for developers, it's not exactly familiar in the context of a single buffer of text. We tend to refer to those things as strings, or byte arrays in specific contexts. Text is more general, yes, but programming aims to add meaning, not take away meaning. In this sense, I can see some unification of names where it makes sense, but I don't think this is one of them.

Regards,

Jeremy Tregunna


On Wednesday, 16 May, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Kurtis Rainbolt-Greene wrote:

>    
> Normally in Programming a numeric entity is called an Integer (when
> it's not a Float, or similar complex number) and a series of
> characters is called a String.
>  
> As a teacher of programming I often find myself explaining what String
> and Integer are. They're not normally used words outside of
> programming, math, or other complex scientific domains.
>  
> I've found, if a bit controversial, it much easier to call them by
> their more used synonyms: Number & Text. People have a easier time
> grasping onto that.
>  
> Thoughts?
>