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Basic Terminiologies

Article No: 1

Data structure

It is a specialized format for organizing and storing the data. A data structure is a way of storing data in a computer so that it can be used efficiently.

Data

Data means value or set of values. In both the singular and plural form, this term is data. For example:

1.      55
2.      18/12/1989
3.      ISBN 81-203-0000-0

In all above examples, some values are represented in different ways. Each value or collection of all such values is termed as data.

Entity

An entity is one that has certain attributes and which may be assigned values. For example, a student in a university is an entity. The possible attributes and the corresponding values for an entity in the present example are:

Entity            :           STUDENT
Attributes     :           NAME                          DOB                 COURSE
Values          :           Amit Chaudhary          18/12/89         BCA

All the students in a university constitute an entity set. Each attribute of an entity set has a range of values, and is called the domain of attribute. Domain is the set of all possible values that could be assigned to the particular attribute. For example, in the STUDENT entity, the attribute SEX has domain as {M, F}.

Information

Processed data or meaningful data is known as information. For example, a set of data is represented during defining the term data, all these data become information if we impose the meaning as mentioned below related to a person:

Data                                                 Meaning

55                                         Age of a person
18/12/1989                          Date of birth of the person
ISBN 81-203-0000-0             Book number, recently published by the person.

Data type

A data type is a term which refers to the kind of data that may appear in computation. For example,

Data             Data type

004               Numeric
Amit             String
18/12/89      Date
| | |              Graphics

Built-in data type

With every programming language, there is a set of data types called built-in data types. For example, in C, FORTRAN and PASCAL, the data types that are available as built-in are listed below:

C                   : int, float, char, double, enum etc.
FORTRAN     : INTEGER, REAL, LOGICAL, CHARACTER…etc.
Pascal           : Integer, Real, Character, Boolean, etc.

With the built-in data types, programming languages allow users a lot of advantages regarding the processing of various types of data. For example, if a user declares a variable of type Real (say), then several things are automatically implied, such as how to store a value for that variable, what are the different operations possible on that type of data, what amount of memory is required to store, etc. All these things are taken care by the compiler or run-time system manager.

Abstract data type

When an application requires a special kind of data which is not available as built-in data type then it is the programmer’s burden to implement his own kind of data. Here, the programmer has to give more effort regarding:

-          How to store value for the data
-          What are the operations that meaningfully manipulate variables of that kind of data
-          Amount of memory required to store for a variable

The programmer has to decide all these things and accordingly implement it. Programmers own data type is termed as abstract data type. Abstract data type is also alternatively termed as user-defined data type.

For example, we want to process dates of the form dd/mm/yy. For this, no built-in data type is known in C, FORTRAN, and Pascal. If a programmer wants to process dates, then an abstract data type, say, Date, can be devised and various operations like: to add few days to a date to obtain another date, to find the days between two dates, to obtain a day for a given date, etc., have to be defined accordingly. Besides these, programmers should decide how to store the data, what amount of memory will be needed to represent a value Date, etc.

An abstract data type, in fact, can be built with the help of built-in data types and other abstract data type(s) already built by the programmer. Some programming languages allow facility to build abstract data type easily. For example, using struct in C, record in Pascal and class in C++, programmers can define their own data types.


Made By: Chaudhary Amit V.
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