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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.
More generally, primitive data types may refer to the standard data types built into a programming language (built-in types). [3] [4] Data types which are not primitive are referred to as derived or composite. [3] Primitive types are almost always value types, but composite types may also be value types. [5]
Primitive data types, such as Booleans, fixed-size integers, floating-point values, and characters, are value types. Objects, in the sense of object-oriented programming, belong to reference types. Assigning to a variable of reference type simply copies the reference, whereas assigning to a variable of value type copies the value.
Primitive data types or built-in data types are types that are built-in to a language implementation. 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.
When an aggregate is entirely composed of the same type of primitive, the aggregate may be called an array; in a sense, a multi-byte word primitive is an array of bytes, and some programs use words in this way. A pointer is a programming concept used in computer science to reference or point to a memory location that stores a value or an object.
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 ...
Primitive wrapper classes are not the same thing as primitive types. Whereas variables, for example, can be declared in Java as data types double, short, int, etc., the primitive wrapper classes create instantiated objects and methods that inherit but hide the primitive data types, not like variables that are assigned the data type values.
In the C programming language, data types constitute the semantics and characteristics of storage of data elements. They are expressed in the language syntax in form of declarations for memory locations or variables. Data types also determine the types of operations or methods of processing of data elements.