When a professor says, "strings are an array of characters" and you proceed to post a question on stack overflow containing the phrase, "strings are an array of characters" and get a healthy dose of knowledge about what strings actually are....

I'm paying for this education?

Not sure what you found out, but strings actually are arrays of characters (in most languages). What did you find out to think otherwise ?

@thecritic Well quite a few people replied saying strings were actually very complex classes and not simply arrays of characters. The language was C++ by the way.

Pure C strings are actually arrays of characters "char *" (a pointer to a character in memory). They are stored in contiguous memory so that you can basically jump from character to character until the null terminator (last character is '\0') which esentially forms a string. C++ added string utilities, but at the very core I am very sure that they are represented in very much the same way. C++ just aimed to make developers' lives easier by providing that whole string library.

@thecritic Interesting! I wonder how they implement it as an array of characters in C++ since arrays can't be of variable length, but you can add characters onto a string changing the size of the array?

Arrays in C/C++ can actually have variable length. You can actually allocate memory on the heap and mess around with that memory how you like, that's one beautiful aspect of the language. I think you need to get your feet wet a little more before you judge your teachers/professors.

@thecritic I wasn't aware of the fact you could have variable length arrays.

To give the full story, I emailed my professor with a thorough explanation of a problem and asked for guidance. He responded with he wasn't sure what the problem was, so I posted the exact same thing in stack overflow and had multiple people tell me that something he had told us in class wasn't correct, WHILE actually giving me an in-depth explanation and answer to my issue....for free....hence my rant.

@setleaf if your professor said that and he replied with "I don't know that" instead of some B's, you're in good hands

@setleaf It's okay, it just hurts my heart a little bit sometimes when people post misleading information. No hard feelings, just wanted to set the record straight on the strings that's all.

Meditation exercise:

Everything is an Array ^_^

@metaory yes disk are basicly array if bit, pointer, memory, or something?
afaik

*of

Everything can be a stream, that's the Rx mantra.