The common data types most often exist in all programming languages and operate or act similarly in various programming languages. However, additional and complex data types may also exist and differ from programming language to programming language. It is important to understand the data types available in a particular programming language. Data types are a collection of data stored as a single value. Data types are used primarily to store, manipulate, and output information and are an integral part of any programming language.
Two of the most widely used data types are the floating point numbers and the fractional numbers. The floating point number is expressed as a number that can be expressed as a fraction with the fractional part being a whole number between -1 and 1.5. While the fractional part is a number that is fractioned down to the nearest whole number.
A floating-point number has a range that is greater than zero but less than Infinity. It can only be divided by factors that are in the positive range where the value is between zero and one. There are different types of floating-point data types including: float, fractional, binary, octal, hexadecimal, binary floating point, rational, Scientific float, scientific fraction, and rational number. The fractional part is used for rounding up to the nearest whole number. The binary data type consists of two’s complement (two digits) for numbers less than or equal to zero.
Another common data type is the double precision data type. This data type has two’s complement representation. Double precision is an arithmetic operation that has an upper and lower hand. The input and output sides of a double precision add function can be programmed by using external programmable logic gates.
A data processor is used to perform numeric data processing. It contains a pair of input and output terminals. An input operation starts from the first input terminals and runs through all terminals until the end of input. An output operation starts from the last input terminal and completes to the third output terminal. The processed data is accumulated into a single result by means of one or more processors.
Spatiotemporal data types deal with the motion of a physical system. The data may be in the form of data that is accumulated or predicted from other sources or it may be in the form of output that is received by some external device. The output of a spatiotemporal processor is typically in the form of plotted points on a plot graph or in the form of real time images. It is usually used in an engineering or scientific research methodology. Spatiotemporal processing algorithm is based on some principles such as the optimization of the maximum likelihood function and finite difference calculus.
Another one of the data types is the Char and Character array data types. These are very similar to float or double Float data types. The Char array has only one dimension, whereas the float has two dimensions. The Char and character arrays can be indexed with characters and there is an optional function called getchar function that returns the character position that is equivalent to the index of the character. For greater flexibility the Char and character array can be indexed with floats or complex numbers.
The floating point data type is the most widely used data type in the programming languages. It represents numbers, real numbers and complex numbers. The floating point numbers can be stored in memory only and they cannot be used to do calculations with them. The values of real and complex number are represented differently by floating point. The IEEE floating point standard was established so that the results of floating-point arithmetic can be comparable with those of the fixed-point arithmetic. In addition to numbers the data types represent character in various formats.