7COMPOSITE DATA TYPES AND MEMORY OBJECTS
Composite data types are composed of other, more primitive, types. Examples include pointers, arrays, records or structures, tuples, and unions. Many high-level languages (HLLs) provide syntactical abstractions for these composite data types that make them easy to declare and use, while hiding their underlying complexities.
Though the costs of using these composite data types are not terrible, a programmer who doesn’t understand them can easily introduce inefficiencies into an application. This chapter provides an overview of those costs to better enable you to write great code.
7.1 Pointer Types
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