basetype

Basetype, often written base type or primitive type, refers to a fundamental data type provided by a programming language’s type system. Basetypes are typically built-in, with fixed representations in memory and predefined operations, serving as the essential building blocks for all other types.

Basetypes include common categories such as numeric types (integers and floating-point numbers), booleans, and characters. In many languages, strings are also treated as a basetype, though some languages model strings as sequences or collections built from a character basetype. The exact set of basetypes varies by language and may be extended by platform conventions or standard libraries.

Derived or composite types are constructed from basetypes using language features. Examples include arrays, records/structs, tuples, enums, and user-defined classes or interfaces. By combining basetypes, programmers create complex data structures while basetypes provide the primitive values and operations that underlie these structures.

In statically typed languages, basetypes participate in type checking, coercion, and performance considerations, with compiler support often mapping them to specific machine representations. In dynamic languages, basetypes still represent the core value categories, but their boundaries may be more fluid at runtime.

Different languages may organize basetypes within a single root hierarchy or across multiple root types. Understanding basetypes helps in reasoning about compatibility, memory layout, operations, and how higher-level abstractions are built from simple, well-defined values. Examples include C’s base types like int and float, Java’s primitive types, and Haskell’s core numeric and character types.