primitive type

plural primitive types

1. idiomaticcomputingA data type provided by a programming language as a basic building block, such as integer, character or Boolean.

   Holonym: type system

   1 more example

   Although assembly language has no primitive types in the way that high-level languages do, assemblers do provide directives to allocate and interpret blocks of memory in specific, low-level ways, highly dependent on the target processor architecture, which programmers can think of as being effectively like primitive types.

   Antonyms: composite type

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see primitive, type: a crude, simplistic, and/or early kind (of a device or physical system).

   The television that existed in the 1920s was of a primitive type, but it paved the way for what would come later.