Hello! Continuing with the Fundamentals of Programming series, we will now look at what Data Types are. If you have not read the earlier series, now would be a good time to start. You can click here go to Part 1.
What are Data Types? Well, they are a way for you to tell the computer what kind of data you are referring to. In English, you have two basic kinds of data types: numbers and letters. To a computer, those would be “char” and “integer”. Char is short for “character” and integer means a whole number, without fractions or decimal points.
Unlike humans, computers are not so intelligent (yet!) and need to be told exactly what kind of data they are dealing with. For us, numbers are “3” and “3.24”. For a computer, you’d need to specify “integer” for whole numbers, “float” or “double” for decimal numbers and even specify the sign! Talk about smart!
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