Common Type System (CTS)


Regardless of the programming language, the resulting program operates internally on data types; therefore, the CLI includes the Common Type System (CTS). The CTS defines how types are structured and laid out in memory, as well as the concepts and behaviors that surround types. It includes type manipulation directives alongside the information about the data stored within the type. The CTS standard applies to how types appear and behave at the external boundary of a language because the purpose of the CTS is to achieve interoperability between languages. It is the responsibility of the runtime at execution time to enforce the contracts established by the CTS.

Within the CTS, types are broken down into two categories.

  • Values are bit patterns used to represent basic types, like integers and characters, as well as more complex data in the form of structures. Each value type corresponds to a separate type designation not stored within the bits itself. The separate type designation refers to the type definition that provides the meaning of each bit within the value and the operations that the value supports.

  • Objects contain within them the object's type designation. (This helps in enabling type checking.) Objects have identity that makes each instance unique. Furthermore, objects have slots that can store other types (either values or object references). Unlike values, changing the contents of a slot does not change the identity of the object.

These two categories of types translate directly to C# syntax that provides a means of declaring each type.




Essential C# 2.0
Essential C# 2.0
ISBN: 0321150775
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 185

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