Everyday Data Structures

Strings

Strings are not precisely data types, although as developers we very often treat them as such. In actuality, strings are simply objects whose value is text; under the hood, strings contain a sequential collection of read-only char objects. This read-only nature of a string object makes strings immutable, which means the objects cannot be changed once they have been created in memory.

It is important to understand that changing any immutable object, not just a string, means your program is actually creating a new object in memory and discarding the old one. This is a more intensive operation than simply changing the value of an address in memory and requires more processing. Merging two strings together is called concatenation, and this ...