Sène

Sõne is a term used in computing to refer to a sequence of characters, typically representing text. In Estonian technical and programming contexts, sõne is the standard word for the data type commonly known in English as a string. A sõne may consist of letters, digits, punctuation and other symbols, and it can be of arbitrary length or empty.

In programming, sõne supports several common operations. Typical capabilities include determining its length, concatenating two or more sõned, extracting substrings, accessing individual characters by position, and searching or replacing parts of the sequence. Many high-level languages treat a sõne as immutable, meaning operations create new strings rather than altering the original; some languages offer mutable variants or specialized views for efficiency.

Encoding and memory considerations are important for sõned. They are usually represented as sequences of Unicode characters, with implementations using encodings such as UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-32. UTF-8 is common in data interchange because it is compact for ASCII and widely interoperable. Practitioners should be aware of the difference between counting code units (potentially multiple units per character) and counting code points (characters), which can affect length calculations and indexing.

In everyday Estonian computing discourse, sõne is the conventional term for a string, while broader text blocks are sometimes referred to as tekst. The concept is foundational in programming, data processing, and text handling, and it appears across languages and platforms with varying syntax and performance characteristics.

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