Types:

Each and every expression, or variable, has a type related with it. The MATLAB supports numerous types of values that are known as classes. A class is necessarily a combination of a type and the operations which can be performed on the values of that type. For illustration, there are various types to store different types of numbers.

For float or real numbers or in the other words numbers with a decimal place (example, 5.3), there are two basic types: single & double. The name of the type double is short for double precision; it stores the larger numbers than single. The MATLAB uses a floating point representation for these numbers.

For integers, there are lots of integer types; example, int8, int16, int32, & int64. The numbers in the names shows the number of bits used to store values of that type. For illustration, the type int8 uses eight bits together to store the integer and its sign. As one bit is used for the sign, that means the seven bits are used to store real number. Each bit stores the number in binary (0's or 1's), and 0 is also a possible value, that means that 2 ^ 7 - 1 or 127 is the largest number which can be stored. The range of values which can be stored in int8 is actually from -128 to +127. This given range can be found for any type by passing the name of the type as a string (that means in single quotes) to the functions intmin and intmax. For illustration,

>> intmin('int8')

ans =

-128

>> intmax('int8')

ans =

127

The larger the number in the type name, the larger the number which can be stored in it. We will mostly use the type int32 whenever an integer type is needed.

The type char is used to store either single characters (example 'x') or strings that are sequences of the characters (example, cat). Both characters and strings are enclosed in single quotes.