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Sounds a bit like the Rope data structure from 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure)

Although instead of a list of chunks, a rope is an immutable binary tree of chunks, so more editing operations are efficient, eg insertion or deletion in the middle of the rope.

Abseil library contains an open source C++ implementation of a similar structure called a Cord: https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/string...



I believe both Firefox and Chrome now use Ropes as their string implementation due to those rather desirable editing operations.




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