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Last active December 15, 2020 13:58
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Common Data Types in C++
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index.md

Common Data Types in C++

Some of the more popular primitive types in C++ are:

  • bool: 1 byte (usually)
  • int: 4 bytes
  • char: 1 byte
  • float: 4 bytes
  • double: 8 bytes
  • void: no size
  • wchar_t: 4 bytes

These data types generally have a fixed size, but they can be modified with keywords like short, long, signed, and unsigned, which affect the size of the type. C++ types are fairly extensible in this way, as opposed to, say, numbers in JavaScript, which would always be equivalent to the double type above.

If a JS number value is used as a boolean (as in either 0 or 1), you would think that only a single byte (or really just a single bit) would be needed to represent this integer, but JavaScript creates all numbers as an 8-byte double.

It's easy to see how this is a lot more flexible than numbers in JavaScript. In C++, we can declare a short int, which will be 2 bytes.

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