A rope is an [Abstract Data Type] used to represent strings. Ropes are typically implemented with B-trees of (possibly immutable) strings.

The Tk text widget uses a B-tree to store textual data along with tags, so it's some sort of augmented rope, where each node has associated metadata.

[Cloverfield] suggests that ropes be used in place of flat strings as the primary string representation in Tcl.

See [http://www.cs.ubc.ca/local/reading/proceedings/spe91-95/spe/vol25/issue12/spe986.pdf] for a real-world implementation of ropes in C.

SGI provides a rope template class in its STL implementation [http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/Rope.html].
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