[OT] Why is it called string?

[Richard Brodie]

"Brian Kelley" <bkelley at wi.mit.edu> wrote in message
news:3f44ce77$0$556$b45e6eb0 at senator-bedfellow.mit.edu...

> That being said, what is the programming-centric etymology of "string"?

The usage of string as "a sequence of similar objects", appears to be very
old. Dropping the 'character' part is probably much more recent (probably
around the classic Unix/C era: old Pascal documentation tends to say
"character string" explicitly.