Chapter 5: Fundamental Types

Informally, data is "stuff" that we want to manipulate, and procedures are descriptions of the rules for manipulating the data. Thus, any powerful programming language should be able to describe primitive data and primitive procedures and should have methods for combining and abstracting procedures and data.
— Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Overview

This chapter details the fundamental building blocks you will use when developing managed code. This includes the CLR's primitive types and others from the Base Class Library (BCL). Primitives compose a technology's core data structures, including such things as numbers, characters, strings, and Booleans. The ability to work effectively with these and to combine them in powerful ways will be instrumental to your success on the platform. You saw in Chapter 2 how types are formed out of other types. Now we'll walk through each primitive in detail, focusing on their storage capabilities, how they are represented in the C#, VB, C++, and IL languages, and the operations available on them.

We'll also take a look at common nonprimitive BCL types, such as common base types, interfaces, utilities, and exceptions. The classes and interfaces covered are common to many other types in the .NET Framework, including some of the primitives themselves. Utility types are simple types that enable you to accomplish very general and fundamental tasks; it's often hard to write a useful program without using them in some manner. The exception types are used by the Framework to communicate unexpected conditions using the infrastructure described in Chapter 3.