Strings

Strings are immutable UTF-8 text values written with double quotes:

assign name "world 🌍"
show "Hello, " + name + "!"

Output: Hello, world 🌍!. Variables infer the string type. Empty strings ("") are valid, and show prints text without quotes followed by a newline. Percent signs are ordinary text, including %s and %n.

Escapes

Escape	Value
\n	Newline
\r	Carriage return
\t	Tab
\"	Double quote
\\	Backslash

show "line one\nline two"
show "She said \"hello\"."
show "A backslash: \\"

Put Unicode characters directly in the source. A string must close on the same source line; use \n for embedded newlines. Unclosed quotes and unsupported escapes produce source diagnostics. NUL characters, including \0, and \u / \x escapes are not supported.

Concatenation and equality

+ joins two strings. == and != compare contents:

assign greeting "Hello, " + "world"
show greeting + "!"
show greeting == "Hello, world"
show greeting != "Goodbye"

Output: Hello, world!, true, true.

String operations require two strings. "count: " + 3 is a type error; numbers and booleans are not implicitly converted. Ordering comparisons, other arithmetic, interpolation, indexing, slicing, and string arrays are not implemented.

Unicode length

len(string) returns the number of Unicode scalar values:

show len("")
show len("hello")
show len("é中🌍")
show len("é")

Output: 0, 5, 3, 2. The last example contains e followed by a combining accent. A combining mark counts separately, even when the result looks like one character. len does not count bytes or grapheme clusters. Text is not normalized: precomposed "é" and combining "é" compare as different strings.

Reassignment and value semantics

assign original "hello"
assign saved original
reassign original original + "!"
show saved
show original

Output: hello, then hello!. Reassignment changes the variable's value; previous copies retain their text. A string variable cannot be reassigned a number or boolean.

String functions

Use string in parameter and return annotations:

function greet(name: string) -> string {
    assign prefix "Hello, "
    return prefix + name + "!"
}
show greet("دنیا 🌍")

Output: Hello, دنیا 🌍!. Returned strings remain valid after function locals go out of scope. The usual function return rules apply.

Storage and debugging

The current backend copies string contents on identifier reads and releases temporary values, old reassigned values, function parameters, and locals at scope exit. Loop-local allocations are released on every iteration. Strings use heap storage; repeated concatenation copies the growing text and can take quadratic time. Allocation or size failures terminate with a runtime diagnostic.

Compile with --debug and use frame variable name in LLDB to inspect the text. See native debugging and the compiler's complete string example.