Android Programming for Beginners - Second Edition

Using variables

That's enough theory. Let's see how we would use our variables and types. Remember that each primitive type needs a specific amount of real device memory. This is one of the reasons that the compiler needs to know what type a variable will be.

Variable declaration

We must first declare a variable and its type before we try to do anything with it. To declare a variable of type int with name unreadMessages, we would type:

int unreadMessages;

That's it – simply state the type, in this case, int, then leave a space and type the name you want to use for this variable. Note also that the semicolon, ; , at the end of the line will tell the compiler that we are done with this line and what follows, if anything, is not part of the variable ...