Lecture 4

Data Types

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Lecture 4 Topics

• Introduction
• Primitive Data Types
• Character String Types
• User-Defined Ordinal Types
• Array Types
• Associative Arrays
• Record Types
• Union Types
• Pointer and Reference Types

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Introduction

• A data type defines a collection of data

objects and a set of predefined operations
on those objects
• A descriptor is the collection of the
attributes of a variable
• An object represents an instance of a
user-defined data type
• One design issue for all data types: What
operations are defined and how are they
specified?

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Primitive Data Types

• Almost all programming languages provide

a set of primitive data types
• Primitive data types: Those not defined in
terms of other data types
• Some primitive data types are merely
reflections of the hardware
• Others require only a little non-hardware
support for their implementation

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Primitive Data Types: Integer

• Almost always an exact reflection of the

hardware so the mapping is trivial
• There may be as many as eight different
integer types in a language
• Java’s signed integer sizes: byte, short,
int, long

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Primitive Data Types: Floating Point

• Model real numbers, but only as

approximations
• Languages for scientific use support at
least two floating-point types (e.g., float
and double; sometimes more
• Defined by Range
and precision
• IEEE Floating-Point
Standard 754

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Primitive Data Types: Complex

• Some languages support a complex type,

e.g., Fortran, and Python
• Each value consists of two floats, the real
part and the imaginary part
• Imaginary part is specified by j (in Python):
(7 + 3j), where 7 is the real part and 3 is
the imaginary part

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Primitive Data Types: Decimal

• For business applications (money)

– Essential to COBOL
– C# offers a decimal data type
• Store a fixed number of decimal digits, in
coded form (BCD)
• Advantage: accuracy
• Disadvantages: wastes memory

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Primitive Data Types: Boolean

• Simplest of all
• Range of values: two elements, one for
“true” and one for “false”
• Could be implemented as bits, but often as
bytes
– Advantage: readability

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Primitive Data Types: Character

• Stored as numeric codings

• Most commonly used coding: ASCII
• An alternative, 16-bit coding: Unicode
(UCS-2)
– Includes characters from most natural
languages
– Java, C# and JavaScript support Unicode
• 32-bit Unicode (UCS-4)
– Supported by Fortran, starting with 2003

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Character String Types

• Values are sequences of characters

• Design issues:
– Is it a primitive type or just a special kind of
array?
– Should the length of strings be static or
dynamic?

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Character String Types Operations

• Typical operations:
– Assignment and copying
– Comparison (=, >, etc.)
– Catenation
– Substring reference
– Pattern matching

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Character String Type in Certain
Languages
• C and C++
– Not primitive
– Use char arrays and a library of functions that provide
operations
• Fortran and Python
– Primitive type with assignment and several operations
• Java
– Object via the String class
• Perl, JavaScript, Ruby, and PHP
- Provide built-in pattern matching.

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Character String Length Options

• Static: COBOL, Java’s String class

• Limited Dynamic Length: C and C++
– String variables can store any number of chars
between zero and the maximum. The null string
used in C
char *str = “apples”; // char ptr points at the
str apples0

• Dynamic (no maximum): Perl, JavaScript

• Ada supports all three string length options

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Character String Type Evaluation

• Aid to writability
• As a primitive type with static length, they
are inexpensive to provide--why not have
them?
• Dynamic length is nice, but is it worth the
expense?

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Character String Implementation

• Static length: compile-time descriptor

• Limited dynamic length: may need a run-
time descriptor for length (but not in C and
C++)
• Dynamic length: need run-time descriptor;
allocation/de-allocation is the biggest
implementation problem

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Compile- and Run-Time Descriptors

Compile-time Run-time
descriptor for descriptor for
static strings limited dynamic
strings
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User-Defined Ordinal Types

• An ordinal type is one in which the range of

possible values can be easily associated
with the set of positive integers
• Examples of primitive ordinal types in Java
– integer
– char
– Boolean
• There are two user-defined ordinal type
: enumeration and subrange.

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Enumeration Types

• All possible values, which are named

constants, are provided in the definition
• C# example
enum days {mon, tue, wed, thu, fri, sat, sun};
• Design issues
– Is an enumeration constant allowed to appear in
more than one type definition, and if so, how is
the type of an occurrence of that constant
checked?
– Are enumeration values coerced to integer?
– Any other type coerced to an enumeration type?

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Evaluation of Enumerated Type

• Aid to readability, e.g., no need to code a

color as a number
• Aid to reliability, e.g., compiler can check:
– operations (don’t allow colors to be added)
– No enumeration variable can be assigned a
value outside its defined range
– Ada, C#, and Java 5.0 provide better support for
enumeration than C++ because enumeration
type variables in these languages are not
coerced into integer types

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Subrange Types

• An ordered contiguous subsequence of an

ordinal type
– Example: 12..18 is a subrange of integer type
• Ada’s design
type Days is (mon, tue, wed, thu, fri, sat, sun);
subtype Weekdays is Days range mon..fri;
subtype Index is Integer range 1..100;

Day1: Days;
Day2: Weekdays;
Day2 := Day1;

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Subrange Evaluation

• Aid to readability
– Make it clear to the readers that variables of
subrange can store only certain range of values
• Reliability
– Assigning a value to a subrange variable that is
outside the specified range is detected as an
error

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Array Types

• An array is an aggregate of homogeneous

data elements in which an individual
element is identified by its position in the
aggregate, relative to the first element.

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Array Indexing

• Indexing (or subscripting) is a mapping

from indices to elements
array_name (index_value_list)  an element
• The syntax of array references
– The array name is followed by the list of
subscripts, which is surrounded by either
parentheses or brackets
– FORTRAN, PL/I, Ada use parentheses
– Most other languages use brackets

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Arrays Index (Subscript) Types

• FORTRAN, C: integer only

• Ada: allows other types such as Boolean and char
• Java: integer types only
• Index range checking
- C, C++, Perl, and Fortran do not specify
range checking
- Java, ML, C# specify range checking
- In Ada, the default is to require range
checking, but it can be turned off

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Subscript Binding and Array Categories

• Static: subscript ranges are statically bound

and storage allocation is static (before run-
time)
– Advantage: efficiency (no dynamic allocation)
• Fixed stack-dynamic: subscript ranges are
statically bound, but the allocation is done
during execution time
– Advantage: space efficiency

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Subscript Binding and Array Categories
(continued)

• Stack-dynamic: subscript ranges are

dynamically bound and the storage
allocation is dynamic (done at run-time)
– Advantage: flexibility (the size of an array need
not be known until the array is to be used)
• Fixed heap-dynamic: similar to fixed stack-
dynamic: storage binding is dynamic but
fixed after allocation (i.e., binding is done
when requested and storage is allocated
from heap, not stack)

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Subscript Binding and Array Categories
(continued)

• Heap-dynamic: binding of subscript ranges

and storage allocation is dynamic and can
change any number of times
– Advantage: flexibility (arrays can grow or shrink
during program execution)

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Subscript Binding and Array Categories
(continued)
• C and C++ arrays that include static
modifier are static
• C and C++ arrays without static modifier
are fixed stack-dynamic
• C and C++ provide fixed heap-dynamic
arrays
• C# provides fixed heap-dynamic
• Perl, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby support
heap-dynamic arrays

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Array Initialization

• Some language allow initialization at the

time of storage allocation
– C, C++, Java, C# example
int list [] = {4, 5, 7, 83}
– Character strings in C and C++
char name [] = “freddie”;
– Arrays of strings in C and C++
char *names [] = {“Bob”, “Jake”, “Joe”];
– Java initialization of String objects
String[] names = {“Bob”, “Jake”, “Joe”};

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Heterogeneous Arrays

• A heterogeneous array is one in which the

elements need not be of the same type
• Supported by Perl, Python, PHP, JavaScript,
and Ruby

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Arrays Operations
• The most common array operations are
Assignment
Catenation
Comparison for equality and Inequality
Slices
• Ada and Python’s allow array assignment and
catenation
• Ruby also provides array catenation
• Fortran provides elemental operations because
they are between pairs of array elements
– For example, + operator between two arrays results in an
array of the sums of the element pairs of the two arrays

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Rectangular and Jagged Arrays

• A rectangular array is a multi-dimensioned

array in which all of the rows have the same
number of elements and all columns have
the same number of elements
• A jagged matrix has rows with varying
number of elements
• C, C++, and Java support jagged arrays
• Fortran, Ada, and C# support rectangular
arrays (C# also supports jagged arrays)

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Slices

• A slice is some substructure of an array;

nothing more than a referencing
mechanism
• Slices are only useful in languages that
have array operations

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Slice Examples

• Consider the following Python declarations:

vector = [2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16]
mat = [[1, 2, 3],[4, 5, 6],[7, 8, 9]]
• vector[3:6] is a three-element array
• mat[1] refers to the second row of mat
• mat[0][0:2] refers to the first and second
element of the first row of mat
• vector[0:7:2] references every other
element of vector

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 Multi-dimensioned Arrays to Single-
dimension Array

• Two common ways:

– Row major order (by rows) – used in most languages
– column major order (by columns) – used in Fortran
Example, consider array matrix below
347
625
138

• It would be stored in row major order as 3, 4, 7, 6, 2, 5, 1, 3, 8

• It would be stored in column major order as 3, 6, 1, 4, 2, 3, 7, 5, 8

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