Primitives
Virgil provides four main primitive types:
int, boolean, char and the
raw types (which are discussed here).
Primitive types have value semantics, meaning that that are always passed by
value, never by reference. Thus a value of a primitive type is never affected
by side effects; 1 is always 1 and 'C'
is always 'C'.
Booleans
local x: boolean = true; local y: boolean = false;
The boolean type is the simplest of all of Virgil's types. The
boolean type has only two values: true and false,
and is the required type for conditional expressions in branches
and loops. The boolean type has three main operators:
and, or, and !. For more information on these
basic operators, see the operators page.
Integers
local x: int = -238; local y: int = 12299;
The int type represents a fairly standard finite set of integer values in Virgil.
Literal positive
and negative numbers written in decimal have type int, while
hexadecimal, octal, and binary
have raw types. Integers can be as large as 2147483647
and as small as -2147483648 (i.e. they represent the same set of values as
C or Java's 32-bit signed integers). Integers in Virgil support the familiar set of binary
and unary operators, such as
add, subtract
multiply, divide
modulus, and negation. Similarly they support comparison
operators such as less than, greater than, etc. For
more information see the operators page.
(Note: Unlike C or Java, the int type in Virgil does not support
the bitwise operators such as |. Instead, these operators are defined
on the raw types.)
Characters
local x: char = 'c'; local y: char = '\n';
Virgil supports the primitive type char that represents characters
encoded using the ASCII character set. Virgil supports a similar syntax to Java
for declaring character literals. The char type supports a limited
set of operations that are related to character comparison; for more details,
see the page on operators.
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