[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.
