Naming data

At its simplest, computer programming is all about manipulating data. Remember, everything you see on your screen can be reduced to numbers that you send to the CPU. Sometimes you yourself represent and work with this data as various types of numbers, but other times the data comes in more complex forms such as text, images and collections.

In your Swift code, you can give each piece of data a name you can use to refer to it later. The name carries with it an associated type that denotes what sort of data the name refers to, such as text, numbers, or a date.

You’ll learn about some of the basic types in this chapter, and you’ll encounter many other types throughout the rest of this book.