Abstract
The notion of type is one of the key ones. A type is essentially a tag assigned to a data entity. Every data transformation is defined for specific data types, which ensures their correctness (you would not want to add the amount of active Reddit users to the average temperature at noon in Sahara, because it makes no sense).
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Notes
- 1.
This language design flaw is corrected in C++, where 'x' has type char.
- 2.
The keyword is usual arithmetic conversions.
- 3.
Until C99; but even nowadays variable length arrays are discouraged by many because if the array size is big enough, the stack will not be able to hold it and the program will be terminated.
- 4.
POSIX is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society. It includes the description of utilities, application programming interface (API), etc. Its purpose is to ease the portability of software, mostly between different branches of UNIX-derived systems.
- 5.
Note that this might not work out of the box for wider types due to possible gaps between struct fields.
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© 2017 Igor Zhirkov
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Zhirkov, I. (2017). Type System. In: Low-Level Programming. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-2403-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-2403-8_9
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Publisher Name: Apress, Berkeley, CA
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