TYPEDEF POST DAILY_DAIRY this_post;

I say this a lot, but programming in particular and computation in general is all about the data. If there is no data to work on, the power of a computer is steered towards being irrelevant.

One of the most important, easy and beginning lessons to learn in any programming course is that of the data types. Data types are ways to tell the compiler what kind of data a certain variable is supposed to hold. The rest is done by the compiler, you don’t usually have to get your hands dirty with bits and bytes of the boorish (occasionally) memory. More often than not, following are the fundamental data types that you’ll find in a programming language:

1. Integer
2. Float
3. Char
4. Bool
5. String
6. Hex
7. Octal

The philosophy behind these data types is that any kind of data, singular or compound, simple or complex; can and have been represented gracefully by these fundamental data types. And whenever there is a need for abstraction, encapsulation, etc (read pillars or OOPs), one has been given the gift of object oriented programming.

That right there is a happy and healthy set up using which great many people have achieved great many things. But there is one thing that differentiates programming which is extremely accurate and programming which is simply magical. And that thing is, providing context to your data.

You see not all integers share the same personality. What they have in common is their structure, but they can differ tremendously in context, relevance and usage. For example, an integer is what represents the length of an array. And it is an integer only that can be used to represent someone’s bank balance account. In fact an integer can represent data from so many fields and cases, that having them all be classified as being just integers is unfairly ignorant of us. Our way of providing variables with some meaning is by having appropriate names. This approach does well when the degree of diversity in your program and the population of variables in each category is not beyond the comprehension of average human conscious. But when the variety and volume of your project starts burgeoning, then variable names are no longer enough to provide context to variables. One such example of this that I have struggled with recently is the source code of the Linux kernel. The data types of the variables used in some of those files were initially so unfamiliar to me that suddenly the C programming languages seemed so labyrinthine. But later I realized later that those oddly new data types weren’t new and unknown at all, but were aliases for our good and old fundamental and complex data types (integers, floats and structures, etc). These aliases were put in place as a careful and elaborate effort to keep every component of the code in context, and hence the whole project, polite.

How is all of this achieved? Using the typedef keyword. The typedef keyword basically gives a new name to an already existing (inbuilt or programmer defined) data types that serves as an alternative (not a replacement) for that data type. For example if I wish to have bank balances of several people in my program then I can choose to give an alternate name BALANCE to the data type integer and use it to define all my bank balance variables.

typedef int BALANCE;

BALANCE b1, b2, b3;

Similarly, I can have other nick names depending on what I need. To see an example of this concept in action, click here. That’s it for now. Ceep Koding.