Data Types

Data Types

Real world data can be of many types e.g character,integer,real,string etc. Since the data which need to be dealt with is of many types, java provides a different number of ways to handle those data. Like other programming languages java supports different data types to handle these data.

Data types are just different containers to identify the type of data and associated operations of handling them.

Data types are of two types:
i)Primitive data types
ii)Reference data types

Primitive data types are part of the language. Those are: 
To handle integer data:
i)Byte
ii)Short
iii)Int
iv)Long
To handle Decimal
v)Float
vi)Double
To handle characters and strings
vii)Char
viii)Boolean

Reference data types are constructed from primitive data types.These are 
i)classes
ii)arrays
iii)interface

A reference data type is used to store the memory address of an object.These data types generally store addresses of a class object or an array.The variable which stores the addresses are known as reference variable and their datatype is known as reference datatype.