The Freya Programming Language

Predefined data types

See also

Freya, as any language running on the .NET's Common Language Runtime (CLR) supports the Common Type System (CTS). This is a uniform and consistent architechture, and there are no priviledged data types in it, so we cannot talk properly about predefined data types. The main integer type, for instance, is just the System.Int32 type from the CTS.

For the sake of simplicity, some of the CTS types are given short names that can be used regardless the context. This includes the possibility of avoiding a qualified name for these frequently used data types. This is achieved by defining synonyms at the global lexical level. You must realize, however, that these are not keywords, and that you can change the meaning of these predefined identifiers if you want.

Integer types

Unfortunately, Pascal and Delphi historically had badly messed nomenclatures for the plethora of integer types their avatars supported. We have tried to simplify this mess as much as possible, while keeping some resemblance with the full qualified library equivalences and the corresponding C#'s keywords:

Freya	Library type	C# type	Meaning
SByte	System.SByte	sbyte	Signed, 8 bits
Byte	System.Byte	byte	Unsigned, 8 bits
Short	System.Int16	short	Signed, 16 bits
ShortInt
UShort	System.UInt16	ushort	Unsigned, 16 bits
Word
Integer	System.Int32	int	Signed, 32 bits
Cardinal	System.UInt32	uint	Unsigned, 32 bits
LongInt	System.Int64	long	Signed, 64 bits
LongWord	System.UInt64	ulong	Unsigned, 64 bits

Real types

Real types are simpler:

Freya	Library type	C# type	Meaning
Single	System.Single	float	Floating point, 32 bits
Float
Double	System.Double	double	Floating point, 64 bits
Real

Other types

These types are frequently used and they already had well established names in the Pascal tradition:

Freya	Library type	C# type	Meaning
Object	System.Object	object	The root of the type system.
String	System.String	string	Immutable, Unicode character strings.
Char	System.Char	char	Unicode characters, represented as unsigned 16 bits integers.
Boolean	System.Bool	bool	Logical types.

See also

The Freya Programming Language
Project and file structure
Type declarations
Literal constants