Chapter 3: Working with Basic Data Types
Everything in a computer is a sequence of binary digits. C's basic data types enable the compiler to tell the computer how to interpret binary sequences of data. Intrinsic data types are predefined and built into the language.
A binary sequence plus a data type results in a meaningful value. The data type not only leads to a meaningful value, but it also helps you determine what kind of operations on that value make sense. Operations involve manipulating values along with converting or casting a value from one data type into a related data type.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Understanding bytes and chunks of data
- Working with whole numbers
- Representing numbers with fractions
- Representing single characters
- Understanding false (or zero) versus true (or anything not exactly zero)
- Understanding how types are implemented on your computer with
sizeof()
- Discovering the minimum and maximum...