- You have seen already several data types in C.
You have seen integers.
You have seen floats and double and so on.
Now it's time to define the data type
in a little bit more formal way.
It's a mechanism for declaring variables
or functions of different categories of data.
What does it mean?
It means that when you tell a computer that
you want a particular label in memory
to be used for floating point computations, or decimals.
It means that you are asking the computer to allocate
you much more memory than for example,
would have been the case if all you had was an integer.
It is important to recognize that we'll see in the cold
right now that C gives you a variety
of choices for integers alone.
Therefore, you have to be very knowledgeable about
the requirements of your program, what type of
data it's supposed to process, and match those
data type with the problem at hand.
For example, are you going to use a lot of very long,
in this case, long means large, integers?
You'll have the long.
Or, your data is only managing very small numbers.
In which case, you will use short.
Are you going to need very high precision
calculators for long double?
Or, six decimal points is enough for you?
All of these will come into place in the
upcoming videos where we will focus in depth
on each one of those data types.