Primitive Data Types

Java is a strongly typed language, that is, when you declare a variable, you need to specify what type of variable it is. Primitive data types are the fundamental data types provided by Java.

Primarily there are 4 categories of primitive types provided by Java. Those are integers, floating point, character and boolean.

Integer type primitives:

Type	Size	Min Value	Max Value
byte	8 bit	-128	127
short	16 bit	-32768	32767
int	32 bit	-2147483648	2147483647
long	64 bit	-9223372036854775808	9223372036854775807

An integer literal value by default is of type int. A long type literal needs to end with ‘L’.

byte v1 = 127;
short v2 = 32767;
int v3 = 2147483647;
long v4 = 9223372036854775807L;

Floating type primitives

Type	Size
float	32 bit
double	64 bit

Floating point type variables can store values that contain fractional portion. By default Java consider a floating point value as double. If you want the value to be stored in float type variable, that value needs to end with ‘f’.

float var1 = 25.5f;
double var2 = 25.5;

Character type primitives

Type	Size	Min Value	Max Value
char	16 bit	0	65536

To store a single character, we can use char type. Java supports Unicode to represent a character, that means, it can represent any character found worldwide.

Character type literals are placed within single quotes.

char c1 = 'A';

You can also store a Unicode character as follow:

char c2 = '\u20B9'; // Indian rupee Unicode representation

You can also store a integer to represent a character as follows:

char c3 = 8377; // Indian rupee numerical representation

Boolean type primitive

Type	Size	Supported Values
boolean	1 bit	true / false

When you want to store the result of a condition, we use boolean type. Its values are true and false.

boolean b1 = true;
boolean b2 = false;
boolean b3 = 5 > 2; // since, 5 is greater than 2, b3 will be true