Primitive and non primitive data types

Primitive and Non-Primitive Data Types

Every programming language requires, programmers to declare the variables, to store values and manipulate them. 

Variables are nothing but reserved spaces in the memory. The variables can store different types of data like numbers, characters, decimals, or even words and sentences. 

The type of data that a variable will hold is determined by the data type with which it is declared.

For Example:

int a;

Here, a is a variable that will hold the integer values as it is declared with int keyword and int here is the data type.

There are two types of data types in C++:

• Primitive Data Types
• Non – Primitive Data Types

Primitive Data Types

The built-in data types in C++, are known as the Primitive Data Types.

Following are the 7 basic data types in C++.

Type	Keyword
Boolean	bool
Character	char
Integer	int
Floating point	float
Double floating point	double
Valueless	void
Wide character	wchar_t

The memory occupied and the range of each of these data types s as follows:

Data Type	Memory Occupied	Range
char	1byte	-127 to 127 or 0 to 255
unsigned char	1byte	0 to 255
signed char	1byte	-127 to 127
int	4bytes	-2147483648 to 2147483647
unsigned int	4bytes	0 to 4294967295
signed int	4bytes	-2147483648 to 2147483647
short int	2bytes	-32768 to 32767
unsigned short int	Range	0 to 65,535
signed short int	Range	-32768 to 32767
long int	4bytes	-2,147,483,647 to 2,147,483,647
unsigned long int	4bytes	0 to 4,294,967,295
float	4bytes	+/- 3.4e +/- 38 (~7 digits)
double	8bytes	+/- 1.7e +/- 308 (~15 digits)
long double	8bytes	+/- 1.7e +/- 308 (~15 digits)
wchar_t	2 or 4 bytes	1 wide character

Non – Primitive Data Types

Non – Primitive Data Types are the ones that are also known as the user-defined data types as they can hold the data as per the choice of the programmer. We will read about these Non – Primitive Data Types in detail later on.