3.Introduction to Data types in C

In the C programming language, data types refer to an extensive system used for declaring variables or functions of different types. The type of a variable determines how much space it occupies in storage and how the bit pattern stored is interpreted.

The C language provides many basic types. Most of them are formed from one of the four basic arithmetic type specifiers in C (char, int, float and double).

The int type
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The int type stores integers in the form of "whole numbers". An integer is typically the size of one machine word, which on most modern home PCs is 32 bits (4 octets). Examples of literals are whole numbers (integers) such as 1,2,3, 10, 100... When int is 32 bits (4 octets), it can store any whole number (integer) between -2147483648 and 2147483647. A 32 bit word (number) has the possibility of representing any one number out of 4294967296 possibilities (2 to the power of 32).

The char type
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The char type is capable of holding any member of the execution character set. It stores the same kind of data as an int (i.e. integers), but typically has a size of one byte. The size of a byte is specified by the macro CHAR_BIT which specifies the number of bits in a char (byte). In standard C it never can be less than 8 bits. A variable of type char is most often used to store character data, hence its name. Most implementations use the ASCII character set as the execution character set, but it's best not to know or care about that unless the actual values are important.

Examples of character literals are 'a', 'b', '1', etc., as well as some special characters such as '\0' (the null character) and '\n' (newline, recall "Hello, World"). Note that the char value must be enclosed within single quotations.

The float type
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float is short for floating point. It stores real numbers also, but is only one machine word in size. Therefore, it is used when less precision than a double provides is required. float literals must be suffixed with F or f, otherwise they will be interpreted as doubles. Examples are: 3.1415926f, 4.0f, 6.022e+23f. float variables can be declared using the float keyword.

The double type
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The double and float types are very similar. The float type allows you to store single-precision floating point numbers, while the double keyword allows you to store double-precision floating point numbers – real numbers, in other words, both integer and non-integer values. Its size is typically two machine words, or 8 bytes on most machines. Examples of double literals are 3.1415926535897932, 4.0, 6.022e+23 (scientific notation). If you use 4 instead of 4.0, the 4 will be interpreted as an int.

The distinction between floats and doubles was made because of the differing sizes of the two types. When C was first used, space was at a minimum and so the judicious use of a float instead of a double saved some memory. Nowadays, with memory more freely available, you do not really need to conserve memory like this – it may be better to use doubles consistently. Indeed, some C implementations use doubles instead of floats when you declare a float variable.

If you want to use a double variable, use the double keyword.

[venkatakrishna]

good introduction to data types in c programming.