Basic Types

Numeric types

The following table gives an overview of the supported numeric types and their ranges:

kind size	signed integers
kind size	type	min	max
8 bits	`i8`	`-128`	`127`
16 bits	`i16`	`-32768`	`32768`
32 bits	`i32`	`-2147483648`	`-2147483647`
64 bits	`i64`	`-9223372036854775808`	`9223372036854775807`
128 bits	`i128` (unsupported so far)	`-170141183460469231731687303715884105728`	`170141183460469231731687303715884105727`
dynamic size	`int`	-∞	+∞
kind size	unsigned integers
kind size	type	min	max
8 bits	`u8`	`0`	`255`
16 bits	`u16`	`0`	`65535`
32 bits	`u32`	`0`	`4294967295`
64 bits	`u64`	`0`	`18446744073709551615`
128 bits	`u128`	`0`	`340282366920938463463374607431768211455`
dynamic size	`uint`	`0`	+∞
kind size	floats
kind size	type	min	max
8 bits	⸺	⸺	⸺
16 bits	`f16` (unsupported so far)	`9.2E41`	`3.4E38`
32 bits	`f32`	`1.4E−45`	`3.4E38`
64 bits	`f64`	`4.9E−324`	`1.7976931348623157E308`
128 bits	`f128` (unsupported so far)	`3.4E-4932`	`1.1897314953572317650857593266280070162E4932`
dynamic size	⸺	⸺	⸺

Currently, types i128, f16 and f128 are not supported yet.

The default type of integer constants is currently i32, but this will most likely be changed to i64.

Here is a small example that calculates and prints the ranges of unsigned integer types:

Boolean type

Boolean values true and false are of type bool, which is the required type for conditions used in if statements or in pre- and post-conditions among others.

Note that bool is fully implemented as a choice type of two unit types TRUE and FALSE.

Character types

There is no character type. It seems risky to define a type for the current 17 planes of Unicode code points. UTF-8 can address 32 planes in 4 bytes. Chances are high that someone will find a use for the additional planes or even extend UTF-8 to support more than 4 bytes per code point. Using i32 for a code point seems sufficiently safe for future Unicode changes.

The following gives a small example that extracts a slice of codepoints and a slice of bytes from a string to create a new string. Note that some emoji-symbols like ☯️ consist of several codepoints (U+262F U+FE0F, meaning yin-yang symbol U+262F in its graphical form U+FE0F), i.e., these might get modified when single codepoints are copied. Even worse, when single utf8-bytes are copied, non 7-bit ASCII characters may get crippled:

nil type

nil is defined as a unit type feature in the standard library. It is intended to be used to represent the absence of a value. Examples may be a lists tail that is empty or the result of a lookup that failed. See Type unit for more information.

void type

void is defined as an absurd feature in the standard library, i.e. a feature that cannot be instantiated since it requires a void type argument. It is intended to be used to represent the absence of a result. void is the result type of an endless loop or a intrinsic features such as fuzion.std.exit that never would return normally. See Type void for more information.

next: Integer Types