Once during a talk I noticed I was getting strange looks and realized I was using the term "string" too freely with an audience of non-technical people. About half of them were in a beginning linguistics class and could at least handle "trees" later on (which terminology I had thought in advance to explain), but the other half were from humanities, social sciences, etc., with no special training in computing (or linguistics). I had to back-pedal quickly to find a good alternative to "string" (Sequence of characters? Piece of text? "Text" is pretty loaded for some humanities people and would have connotations I wouldn't want.) I'd never before realized how convenient (but obscure!) the term "string" was. Here these poor people were trying to figure out how some thin piece of rope was involved in programming languages ... .

-- Fritz

On Wed 11 Jul 07, at 11:54 am, Andrew Coppin wrote:

I see this *a lot* with computers. People who know lots about computers forget that some people don't know that a "megabyte" is (considerably) bigger than a "kilobyte". Or that having a faster CPU doesn't make Windows load faster. The number of technical documents I've seen that make perfect sense to a knowledgable person, but would be utter gibberish to most normal folk...