In computer science, primitive types — as distinct from composite types — are data types provided by a programming language as basic building blocks. Depending on the language and its implementation, primitive types may or may not have a one-to-one correspondence with objects in the computer's memory.   Computer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems. ... In computer science, composite types are datatypes which can be constructed in a programming language out of that languages primitive types and other composite types. ... Data type is a type of data in a type system in computer programming. ... A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine (often a computer). ...

Primitive types are also known as built-in types or basic types.

The actual range of primitive types that is available is dependent upon the specific programming language that is being used. For example, in C, strings are a composite data type, whereas in modern dialects of Basic they are a primitive data type. The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a low-level standardized programming language developed in the early 1970s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for use on the... In computer programming and some branches of mathematics, strings are sequences of various simple objects. ... BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of high-level programming languages. ...

Typical primitive types may include:

• character (character, char);
• Integer (integer, int, short, long) with a variety of precisions;
• floating-point number (float, double, real, double precision);
• Fixed-point (fixed) with a variety of precisions and a programmer-selected scale.
• boolean having the values true and false.
• datatype (string), a sequence of characters, which can be of zero length – containing no characters – if desired);
• reference (also called a pointer or handle), a small value referring to another object's address in memory, possibly a much larger one.

More sophisticated types which can be primitive include: In computer science, the term integer is used to refer to any data type which can represent some subset of the mathematical integers. ... In computer science, precision of a numerical quantity is a measure of the detail in which the quantity is expressed. ... A floating-point number is a digital representation for a number in a certain subset of the rational numbers, and is often used to approximate an arbitrary real number on a computer. ... // Introduction In computing, a fixed-point number representation is a real data type for a number that has a fixed number of digits before and after the radix point (e. ... In computer science, precision of a numerical quantity is a measure of the detail in which the quantity is expressed. ... An order of magnitude is the class of scale or magnitude of any amount, where each class contains values of a fixed ratio to the class preceding it. ... In computer science the boolean datatype, sometimes called the logical datatype, is a primitive datatype having two values: one and zero (sometimes called true and false). ... In computer programming and some branches of mathematics, strings are sequences of various simple objects. ... This article discusses a general notion of reference in computing. ... It has been suggested that Software pointer be merged into this article or section. ...

• Tuples in ML
• Linked lists in Lisp
• complex numbers in Fortran, C (C99), Python
• rational numbers in Lisp
• first class functions, closures, continuations in Functional programming languages such as Lisp and ML

One usually expects operations on primitive types to be the fastest language contructs there are. Integer addition, for example, can be performed as a single machine instruction, and some processors offer specific instructions to process sequences of characters with a single instruction. In particular, the C standard mentions that "a 'plain' int object has the natural size suggested by the architecture of the execution environment". This means that int is likely to be 32 bits long on a 32-bit architecture. In mathematics, a tuple is a finite sequence of objects, that is, a list of a limited number of objects. ... ML is a general-purpose functional programming language developed by Robin Milner and others in the late 1970s at the University of Edinburgh, whose syntax is inspired by ISWIM. Historically, ML stands for metalanguage as it was conceived to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover (the language of... In computer science, a linked list is one of the fundamental data structures used in computer programming. ... Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully-parenthesized syntax. ... Wikibooks Algebra has more about this subject: Complex numbers In mathematics, a complex number is an expression of the form where a and b are real numbers, and i is a specific imaginary number, called the imaginary unit, with the property i 2 = −1. ... Fortran (also FORTRAN) is a statically typed, compiled, programming language originally developed in the 1950s and still heavily used for scientific computing and numerical computation half a century later. ... The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language (often, just C) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie for use... Python is an interpreted programming language created by Guido van Rossum in 1990. ... In mathematics, a rational number (or informally fraction) is a ratio or quotient of two integers, usually written as the vulgar fraction a/b, where b is not zero. ... Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully-parenthesized syntax. ... In computer science, a first class function is a programming language construct that allows a function to be treated in many respects like ordinary data objects. ... In programming languages, a closure is a function that refers to free variables in its lexical context. ... In computing, a continuation is a representation of the execution state of a program (for example, the call stack or values of variables) at a certain point. ... Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions. ... Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully-parenthesized syntax. ... ML is a general-purpose functional programming language developed by Robin Milner and others in the late 1970s at the University of Edinburgh, whose syntax is inspired by ISWIM. Historically, ML stands for metalanguage as it was conceived to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover (the language of... CPU redirects here. ... The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language (often, just C) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie for use...

Most languages do not allow the behaviour or capabilities of primitive types to be modified by programs. Exceptions include Smalltalk, which permits primitive datatypes to be extended within a program, adding to the operations that can be performed on them or even redefining the built-in operations. Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language designed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Adele Goldberg, and others during the 1970s, influenced by Sketchpad and Simula. ...