Java has eight (8) primitive data types. Variables are declared to be one of the data types in Java. The data type of a variable determines what value can be stored in it.

• Java has eight (8) primitive data types.
• A variable is declared by writing the dataType first and the variable name beside it. The declaration ends with a semi-colon.
• Primitive data cannot do anything except storing data

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There are different data types in Java. Java has data types that are termed as primitive.

Java has eight (8) primitive data types. Variables are declared to be one of the data types in Java. The data type of a variable determines what value can be stored in it. Variables are examples of identifiers.

Why are some variables called primitive?

When something is termed primitive, it implies it is crude, archaic or undeveloped.

Java calls data types that cannot do anything else except storing values as primitive.

For instance, a variable that holds the age of a person contains only the number of years of the person. This age value doesn’t do anything else in addition. The value cannot perform any other function.

Hence, such data are termed primitive.

Why is it important to assign data types to variables?

In real life, programs are created to collect trove of data. These data may have different categories.

For example, a program created to collect data about students will collect their names. This will be a string of characters. Thus, such variable will be of String data type. Note that a String data type is an object. Example,

String name=“Douglas”;

Another variable will likely collect the students’ age in years. Such a variable will likely be declared as an int (integer) because decimal figures won’t be needed for months or weeks. Example:

int age=19;

There are several advantages for giving a data type to a variable.

First, it determines the amount of memory the variable will use. For instance, a double variable uses more memory than an int variable. It also helps to know how the variable formats data.

For instance, if you write a program to calculate distance between the stars or planets, you need a data type that can hold huge values.

If, however, you declare a variable to hold the distance between atoms, you need data types that can handle small distances.

There are eight primitive data types in Java. These are byte, short, int, long float, double, char, and boolean. Each data type has its memory size.

Tabular Representation of  primitive data types

For the Java language, all the sizes and ranges of all the primitive data types are the same on all computers.

The integer data types

Out of the eight (8) primitive data types, four(4) of them are integers. These are byte, short, int and long.

Declaring a variable

A variable is declared by writing the dataType first and the variable name beside it. The declaration ends with a semi-colon. That’s ,

dataType variableName;

Examples are;

int age;

double price;

float height;

char alphabet;

boolean statust;

Multi-declaration of same Data Type

In real programs, many variables are used. Because of that, declaring variables one after the other can be tedious. There’s a way to make the declaration less demanding especially if the variables are of the same dataType.

If two or more variables are of the same data type, they can be declared together in one line horizontally. That’s,

dataType age, height, weight;

Note that multi-declaration of variables ends with a semi-colon.

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