A string is text between quotation marks: e.g., "hello" and " spaces Count ". Strings are built-in primitive types (like numbers and symbols ). The only string functions you'll need for this assignment are string? and string=?, both built-in. We won't use any of the string-processing functions you can find mentioned in help-desk

The intended difference between strings and symbols is that strings are used when you may want to look at individual characters inside the string. (Indeed, the name refers to "characters that have been strung together".) We won't use this aspect of strings, and we'd actually use symbols except that we'll be working with web pages, that use strings.