Computer Programming - Data Types

Let s discuss about a very simple but very important concept available in almost all the programming languages which is called data types. As its name indicates, a data type represents a type of the data which you can process using your computer program. It can be numeric, alphanumeric, decimal, etc.

Let’s keep Computer Programming aside for a while and take an easy example of adding two whole numbers 10 & 20, which can be done simply as follows −

10 + 20

Let s take another problem where we want to add two decimal numbers 10.50 & 20.50, which will be written as follows −

10.50 + 20.50

The two examples are straightforward. Now let s take another example where we want to record student information in a notebook. Here we would pke to record the following information −

Name:
Class:
Section:
Age:
Sex:

Now, let s put one student record as per the given requirement −

Name: Zara Ap
Class: 6th
Section: J
Age: 13
Sex: F

The first example dealt with whole numbers, the second example added two decimal numbers, whereas the third example is deapng with a mix of different data. Let s put it as follows −

Student name "Zara Ap" is a sequence of characters which is also called a string.

Student class "6th" has been represented by a mix of whole number and a string of two characters. Such a mix is called alphanumeric.

Student section has been represented by a single character which is J .

Student age has been represented by a whole number which is 13.

Student sex has been represented by a single character which is F .

This way, we reapzed that in our day-to-day pfe, we deal with different types of data such as strings, characters, whole numbers (integers), and decimal numbers (floating point numbers).

Similarly, when we write a computer program to process different types of data, we need to specify its type clearly; otherwise the computer does not understand how different operations can be performed on that given data. Different programming languages use different keywords to specify different data types. For example, C and Java programming languages use int to specify integer data, whereas char specifies a character data type.

Subsequent chapters will show you how to use different data types in different situations. For now, let s check the important data types available in C, Java, and Python and the keywords we will use to specify those data types.

C and Java Data Types

C and Java support almost the same set of data types, though Java supports additional data types. For now, we are taking a few common data types supported by both the programming languages −

These data types are called primitive data types and you can use these data types to build more complex data types, which are called user-defined data type, for example a string will be a sequence of characters.

Python Data Types

Python has five standard data types but this programming language does not make use of any keyword to specify a particular data type, rather Python is intelpgent enough to understand a given data type automatically.

Numbers

String

List

Tuple

Dictionary

Here, Number specifies all types of numbers including decimal numbers and string represents a sequence of characters with a length of 1 or more characters. For now, let s proceed with these two data types and skip List, Tuple, and Dictionary, which are advanced data types in Python.