Standard Types

While most of the types you will work with in Elements are part of the APIs provided by the individual Platforms (e.g. the .NET Base Class Library, the Cocoa frameworks, the Java and Android SDKs and Island RTL), there are few very basic standard types provided by the elements compiler itself. In some cases, these too map to classes provided by the platform).

  • Object – the root of the class hierarchy
  • Dynamic – a placeholder for dynamic invokation at runtime
  • InstanceType – the type of the current class instance
  • String – a type for working with text
  • Char – a type for working with individual characters of a string
  • Integers – types for working with whole numbers
  • Floats – types for working with numbers, including decimals
  • Boolean – a type representing either true or false
  • Pointers – types that reference an address in memory
  • Arrays – a random-access list of items
  • Sequences – a sequential list of items without random access
  • Indexes & Ranges – types representing an size-independent offset or a range of offsets
  • Dictionaries (Swift and Go only) – a mapping of key/value pairs