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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 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.
Typical examples of opaque data types include handles for resources provided by an operating system to application software. For example, the POSIX standard for threads defines an application programming interface based on a number of opaque types that represent threads or synchronization primitives like mutexes or condition variables. [2]
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]
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 ...
A set of primitive processes, which would be termed primitive functions in modern languages. The data structure of IPL is the list, but lists are more intricate structures than in many languages. A list consists of a singly linked sequence of symbols, as might be expected—plus some description lists , which are subsidiary singly linked lists ...
A symbol in computer programming is a primitive data type whose instances have a human-readable form. Symbols can be used as identifiers. In some programming languages, they are called atoms. [1] Uniqueness is enforced by holding them in a symbol table.
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 ...