Types of Values
Elements of Programming defines a value to be a sequence of bits, called datum, together with its interpretation. A value type, then, is a correspondence between a set of data and a set of abstract or concrete entities sharing characteristic attributes. The set of entities is sometimes called a species. For example, a value type—call it small_int_value— can establish the correspondence between a sequence of 16 bits and integers values from -32,768 to +32,767 through a two's complement representation.
Value types do not include constraints on how their values are stored. E.g., the type small_int_value in the example above does not determine byte order, alignment, or even the number of 8-bit bytes used to store the 16 bits of the value type's representation. Since the values underpinning value types are not stored, value types also do not include a notion of mutation. A type that does determine constraints for storage in random-access memory is often called an object type.
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