[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
DAVID MALAN: What these running times are,
and we'll continue to revisit this issue as we look at more algorithms and soon,
data structures, still.
[END PLAYBACK]
DOUG LLOYD: The chapter title of this segment in the video
is very, very honest.
DAVID MALAN: It's based on the Maury Povich meme.
DOUG LLOYD: Yeah, strings--
DAVID MALAN: Dated, but never truer.
DOUG LLOYD: Is he still doing TV?
Anyway, strings are a lie, and now we finally tell the truth about them.
DAVID MALAN: And we talked about that some weeks ago
when we deliberately introduced, via the CS50 library, the typedef that
is a string type, which doesn't really exist because, of course,
it's just the charstar underneath the hood.
But this is, I think, interesting, right,
because we're only a few weeks into the class,
but we're enough weeks into the class where
it's like time to start taking off these training wheels.
Because I do think we do students a disservice ultimately
if we didn't take these training wheels off,
and we sort of allowed them to think through the duration of our use of C
that, like, strings are in the language.
DOUG LLOYD: Right.
If they were to go out later on and program
in C without including the CS50 library, they would be possibly stuck.
DAVID MALAN: No, you don't want to hamper students in that way.
And I think now it affords us an opportunity,
too, to remove those training wheels not just for the sake of removing them
but to actually now dive in deeper.
Let's zoom in.
Let's enhance it, like what is going on underneath the hood,
and use it as a genuinely interesting, stimulating, if not
challenging, opportunity to discuss the underlying implementation details.