TMC - 9 Digital Tech Semester 2
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  1. 9 Digital Tech
  2. /
  3. From Python to C-sharp
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  5. Explicit typing

Explicit typing

Computers store all information as sequences of numbers, and different kinds of information are encoded using different methods. These different kinds of information are known as types, and they exist in all programming languages.

The Python interpreter allows the programmer to ignore many of the issues of typing much of the time, as it can infer a lot from the code. But you would have had to convert numbers into text using the str() function, and this is an example of type conversion.

C# requires you to be a lot more explicit about the types of variables and their conversion, so you’ll get a lot more exposure to the idea of types.

Common types

int

Integers are whole numbers, positive or negative. They are a fixed number of digits long, so there is a maximum and minimum value you can store in one.

float/double

Floating point is the most common way to store decimals; it stores them in scientific notation. There are a certain number of digits for the exponent, and a certain number for the mantissa. The fixed number of digits means there are values that can’t be stored, so the computer will round to the nearest valid value. Floats are usually 32-bits (32 binary digits long), and doubles are, as their name might suggest, 64-bits long. This gives doubles much more room for extra digits, meaning far less likelihood of drifting and errors due to rounding.

char/strings

Any time input is read in from the keyboard, or text output to the screen, strings of characters are involved. A single entity, like ‘a’, ‘%’ or ‘3’ are characters, and are indicated with single quotes. Multiple characters together are known as strings, and are represented with double quotes.

Note that Python doesn’t really distinguish between characters and strings, and uses single and double quotes interchangeably. This is not the case in C#.

bool

Booleans are true/false values. The conditions in if and while loops must have boolean values; that is, they evaluate either to true or false.

In Python, the keywords are True/False, with a capital letter. In C#, they are true/false, without one.