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Many languages have explicit pointers or references. Reference types differ from these in that the entities they refer to are always accessed via references; for example, whereas in C++ it's possible to have either a std:: string and a std:: string *, where the former is a mutable string and the latter is an explicit pointer to a mutable string (unless it's a null pointer), in Java it is only ...
In Java [5]: 84 these are StringBuffer and StringBuilder (mutable versions of Java String) and in .NET this is StringBuilder (mutable version of .Net String). Python 3 has a mutable string (bytes) variant, named bytearray. [6] Additionally, all of the primitive wrapper classes in Java are immutable.
For function that manipulate strings, modern object-oriented languages, like C# and Java have immutable strings and return a copy (in newly allocated dynamic memory), while others, like C manipulate the original string unless the programmer copies data to a new string.
In computer science, string interning is a method of storing only one copy of each distinct string value, which must be immutable. [1] Interning strings makes some string processing tasks more time-efficient or space-efficient at the cost of requiring more time when the string is created or interned.
COBOL uses the STRING statement to concatenate string variables. MATLAB and Octave use the syntax "[x y]" to concatenate x and y. Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET can also use the "+" sign but at the risk of ambiguity if a string representing a number and a number are together. Microsoft Excel allows both "&" and the function "=CONCATENATE(X,Y)".
In object-oriented programming, "immutable interface" is a pattern for designing an immutable object. [1] The immutable interface pattern involves defining a type which does not provide any methods which mutate state. Objects which are referenced by that type are not seen to have any mutable state, and appear immutable.
In C#, a class is a reference type while a struct (concept derived from the struct in C language) is a value type. [5] Hence an instance derived from a class definition is an object while an instance derived from a struct definition is said to be a value object (to be precise a struct can be made immutable to represent a value object declaring attributes as readonly [6]).
Mutable (non-const) operations can then be implemented in such a way that they create new objects instead of modifying the existing ones. This approach is characteristic of functional programming and is also used by the string implementations in Java, C#, and Python. (See Immutable object.)