Mission 1.3 - Primitives

In English, words can be categorized as nouns, verbs or adjectives. Just how words are the building blocks to a sentence, primitives are building blocks to a command. Primitives are basic data types that help build larger structures. The four types of primitives in Python are integers (ints), floats, strings and boolean.

 

First, we will cover ints.

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An int in coding is the same as in math- a counting number. These data types are used to represent numeric values. Ex: 1, 52, 315

 

A float is short for floating point number. This numeric data type is used for rational numbers that are used for decimals. Ex: 3.14, 56.4, 1.78

 

The next basic data structure is a string. Strings are a collection of letters, numbers, words or other characters. This type is constructed when the collection is enclosed by single or double quotes. Ex. ‘John’, ‘apple’, ‘3.14’, “g2g”

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The last primitive is a boolean data type. A boolean data type simply means true or false, which is represented as 1 or 0, respectively. Boolean data types can be used to help the computer make decisions.

 

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If you’re ever unsure of which data type you have, Python has a way to check the type of primitive by writing type(). This is a function which we will explain later in the lessons.