String

Strings in Betty are enclosed between a pair of double quotes ( " ). They are interned using a string lookup table so they can be lightweight—in terms of memory overhead and allocations (on the stack vs. the heap), as well as be accessed very fast in ideal usage scenarios.

"Hello, World!";

In an addition operation, if either operand is a string, then the result is concatenated and returned as a string. This has been implemented to match the expected behavior in several programming languages.

"Hi " + 5; # Returns "Hi 5"

Furthermore, in addition to equality and inequality operations, strings allow comparisons like > and <, based on lexicographical order. This behavior may not always make intuitive sense to a newer programmer, nonetheless it is supported in plenty of programming languages. In the back-end, C#'s CompareTo standard library function (akin to strcmp in C) is utilized.

"apple" < "banana"; # Returns `true`, since 'a' is less than 'b'

Compound (shorthand assignment) is supported in strings only through the addition ( + ) operator.

Escape sequences

Sequence	Description
\n	Newline
\t	Tab
\"	Double quote
\'	Single quote
\\	Backslash
\0	Null character

Note

Character literals also support the aforementioned sequences.