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copied!<p>"Data structure" is a very general term of theoretical computer science. Any technique for the organization of machine-manipulable data can be thought of as a data structure. Even a single machine integer is a data structure, because there's more than one way that the bits could be interpreted. Most often, though "data structure" is used to refer to the organization applied to a <em>large</em> collection of data: for instance, a binary tree, a hash table, a flat array, or a linked list. And usually when people talk about data structures they do it in generic terms, not specific to a particular programming language.</p> <p>"Composite data type" is a term-of-art of C and related languages, meaning "any language data type that isn't a machine number", more or less. Composite data types are data structures, but not all data structures are composite data types -- machine numbers are too simple to be composite data types, and a complex data structure is likely to be built out of <em>several</em> composite data types.</p> <p>"Class" is a term-of-art of object-oriented programming languages, referring to a data type that defines not only data but "methods" for manipulating the data. In C++, all class types are composite data types, but not all composite data types are class types (the others are "plain old data", or "POD", types).</p> <p>"String" is the generic term for a data structure that holds a sequence of small machine integers that somehow represent text. Just about every programming language has some notion of a string, but no two of them are the same. Strings are by definition data structures. In the C family, strings are always composite data types, because a <em>single</em> machine integer is not big enough for more than a few characters. In object-oriented programming languages, strings are usually, but not always, class types.</p> <p>I hope this at least advances you to a more sophisticated level of confusion.</p>

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