Datatype
In computer science, datatype is the fundamental unit of variable typing present in all programming languages. Computers treat any data as sequence of bits (values that can be either zero or one), and long row of bits compose all sorts of files: images, audio, applications, text, tables, etc. Datatype defines what data is (integer, floating-point number, characters, etc.), possible operations with them (such as addition or subtraction) and the range of values. The term “datatype” is usually used to describe the most primitive types, which historically are:
int: 32-bit integers ranging from -232 to 232;
float: floating-point number according to the IEEE 754 standard;
double: double-precision floating-point number, the same as float but uses twice as much bits and is twice more accurate;
char: simple characters texts are composed of [1, 23] .
Different programming languages may introduce their own elementary datatypes, such as byte in Java or bool in C++. The primitive values can also be chained together into arrays with pointers and emulate any data structure.
Object-oriented programming languages provide the way to create custom types of data out of these primitives through classes. During initialisation, an object will be created from the class blueprint and it will possess the associated fields and methods. OOP pioneered a number of languages, such as Smalltalk, Java and C++.
There are numerous typing philosophies that different languages implement, with the most basic ones being static and dynamic typing. Static typing requires the type of variable to be declared by software developer and be known during writing the code [2, 36], meanwhile dynamic typing relieves the developer from this responsibility and allows variables to change its type of data during its execution.
IEEE Computer Society. (1985). IEEE Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic. New York: IEEE.
B. W. Kernighan, D. M. Ritchie. (1988). The C Programming Language. New Jersey, the USA: Murray Hill.