Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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]
A basic example is in the argv argument to the main function in C (and C++), which is given in the prototype as char **argv—this is because the variable argv itself is a pointer to an array of strings (an array of arrays), so *argv is a pointer to the 0th string (by convention the name of the program), and **argv is the 0th character of the ...
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 ...
[8] [9] [10] In ALGOL 68, the Linux kernel, [11] and in some English textbooks, the V and P operations are called, respectively, up and down. In software engineering practice, they are often called signal and wait, [12] release and acquire [12] (standard Java library), [13] or post and pend. Some texts call them vacate and procure to match the ...
Some programming languages provide a built-in (primitive) rational data type to represent rational numbers like 1/3 and −11/17 without rounding, and to do arithmetic on them. Examples are the ratio type of Common Lisp, and analogous types provided by most languages for algebraic computation, such as Mathematica and Maple.
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 ...