Data Types Overview

DScript supports six basic types of data:

o Numbers

o Text strings

o Boolean values

o Function pointers

o Lists

o Objects

These are the same data types supported by standard JavaScript. However, DScript extends the definition of a number to include complex numbers and numbers with units of measure. Furthermore, DScript extends its treatment of lists and objects so that they behave exactly like the other, more basic data types.

Many of the primitives built into DScript can accept a wide variety of data types as input and will adapt to the data you provide. For example, the Add operator (+) in the expression

2+3   // = 5

performs simple numeric addition. However, in the expression

"Hello "+"world" // = Hello world

the same operator performs text concatenation. Furthermore, in the expression

[[1,2],[3,4]]+[[6,7],[8,9]] // = [[7,9],[11,13]]

the Add operator performs matrix addition.

The following sections describe each of DScript’s data types. More detail on each data type can be found in subsequent chapters.