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In computing, language primitives are the simplest elements available in a programming language. A primitive is the smallest 'unit of processing' available to a programmer of a given machine, or can be an atomic element of an expression in a language. Primitives are units with a meaning, i.e., a semantic value in the language.
Integer addition, for example, can be performed as a single machine instruction, and some offer specific instructions to process sequences of characters with a single instruction. [7] But the choice of primitive data type may affect performance, for example it is faster using SIMD operations and data types to operate on an array of floats.
In functional programming languages that rely heavily on lists, data references are managed abstractly by using primitive constructs like cons and the corresponding elements car and cdr, which can be thought of as specialised pointers to the first and second components of a cons-cell. This gives rise to some of the idiomatic "flavour" of ...
A functional program is developed with a set of primitive ... This recursive definition is an example of ... Computer programming is the process of writing or ...
User-defined data types are non-primitive types. For example, Java's numeric types are primitive, while classes are user-defined. A value of an atomic type is a single data item that cannot be broken into component parts. A value of a composite type or aggregate type is a collection of data items that can be accessed individually. [6]
The only exception is the primitive data types, which are not considered to be objects for performance reasons (though can be automatically converted to objects and vice versa via autoboxing). Some features like operator overloading or unsigned integer data types are omitted to simplify the language and avoid possible programming mistakes.
In computer science, boxing (a.k.a. wrapping) is the transformation of placing a primitive type within an object so that the value can be used as a reference. Unboxing is the reverse transformation of extracting the primitive value from its wrapper object. Autoboxing is the term for automatically applying boxing and/or unboxing transformations ...
An example of a primitive recursive programming language is one that contains basic arithmetic operators (e.g. + and −, or ADD and SUBTRACT), conditionals and comparison (IF-THEN, EQUALS, LESS-THAN), and bounded loops, such as the basic for loop, where there is a known or calculable upper bound to all loops (FOR i FROM 1 TO n, with neither i ...