Data Types

Imagine you're a chef in the kitchen, and you have many ingredients to cook with. These ingredients are like the basic building blocks for your dish. Similarly, in C++, data types are the basic building blocks for your program. They are the way we represent different kinds of data in our code, like numbers, characters, and strings (text).

Fundamental Data Types

C++ provides several fundamental data types that can be used to represent different kinds of data. These data types can be broadly categorized into the following groups:

1. Integer types: These data types are used to represent integer values (whole numbers). Some examples are int, short int, long int, and long long int.
2. Floating-point types: These data types are used to represent real numbers (numbers with a fractional/decimal part). Examples include float and double.
3. Character types: These data types are used to represent single characters, like 'a' or '7'. The most common character type is char.
4. Boolean type: This data type is used to represent true or false values. It is called bool.

Integer Types

Think of integer types as the different sizes of measuring cups. They can hold varying amounts of data (or numbers). The most commonly used integer types in C++ are:

• short int: Can store small integer values, typically between -32,768 and 32,767.
• int: Can store a wide range of integer values, typically between -2,147,483,648 and 2,147,483,647.
• long int: Can store large integer values, typically between -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 and 9,223,372,036,854,775,807.
• long long int: Can store very large integer values, with at least the same range as long.

Floating-Point Types

Floating-point types are like measuring cups with a built-in scale – they can hold both whole numbers and decimals. C++ provides two floating-point types:

• float: Can store single-precision floating-point numbers (about 7 decimal digits of accuracy).
• double: Can store double-precision floating-point numbers (about 15 decimal digits of accuracy).
• long double: Can store very large double-precision floating-point values.

double provides greater precision than float, but it also consumes more memory.

Character Types

Character types are like individual letters or symbols that you can use to form words and sentences. In C++, the most common character type is char. It can store a single character, like A, z, or #.

Characters in C++ are encoded using the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) system, which assigns a unique number to each character. This means that, under the hood, a char is actually an integer type that can store values between 0 and 255.

Boolean Type

The boolean type is like a simple light switch – it can be either on (true) or off (false). In C++, the boolean type is called bool.

bool variables can only store two values: true or false. They are commonly used to represent the outcome of a condition or to control the flow of a program.

Pointer Types

In C++, pointers are a special type of data type that can store the memory address of another variable. They provide a way to indirectly access and manipulate the value stored at that memory address.

A pointer is declared by specifying the data type it points to, followed by an asterisk (*).

It is important to note that the data type specified when declaring a pointer is not the type of the pointer itself but rather the type of data it will point to. This means that int* is a pointer that can store the address of an int variable, while char* can store the address of a char variable.

We will discuss these more in a later chapter

Strings and Arrays

Arrays are a list type that stores multiples of the same item. For example, strings are an array of char which you would use for storing words or sentances. This will be explored in a later chapter, but it is reccomended to read variables first.