CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2012/ch1 1w21 aa

Primitive Objects

Introduction

A primitive data type is a basic or in-built type that a programming language provides for its users. These data types can be used for building other complex and composite data types [1]. In most languages, primitive types usually consist of basic value types for representing the data to be stored. As these data types are built-in, the compilers for these languages usually provide inbuilt support for these data types and so would support most basic operations. In dynamically typed languages like Ruby, these are represented as objects and are referred to as primitive objects. This article discusses the various primitive data types/objects that are present in various objected oriented programming languages and their benefits.