## # Types

Solidity is a statically typed language, which means that the type of each variable (state and local) needs to be specified. Solidity provides several elementary types which can be combined to form complex types.

The concept of “undefined” or “null” values does not exist in Solidity, but newly declared variables always have a default value dependent on its type. To handle any unexpected values, you should use the revert function to revert the whole transaction, or return a tuple with a second bool value denoting success.

### # Value Types

The following types are also called value types because variables of these types will always be passed by value, i.e. they are always copied when they are used as function arguments or in assignments.

#### # Booleans

bool: The possible values are constants true and false.

#### # Integers

int / uint: Signed and unsigned integers of various sizes. Keywords uint8 to uint256 in steps of 8 (unsigned of 8 up to 256 bits) and int8 to int256. uint and int are aliases for uint256 and int256, respectively.

The address type comes in two flavours, which are largely identical:

• address: Holds a 20 byte value (size of an Ethereum address).
• address payable: Same as address, but with the additional members transfer and send.

The idea behind this distinction is that address payable is an address you can send Ether to, while a plain address cannot be sent Ether.

Type conversions:

#### # Contract Types

Every contract defines its own type. You can implicitly convert contracts to contracts they inherit from. Contracts can be explicitly converted to and from the address type.

Explicit conversion to and from the address payable type is only possible if the contract type has a receive or payable fallback function. The conversion is still performed using address(x). If the contract type does not have a receive or payable fallback function, the conversion to address payable can be done using payable(address(x)). You can find more information in the section about the address type.

#### # Fixed-size byte arrays

The value types bytes1, bytes2, bytes3, …, bytes32 hold a sequence of bytes from one to up to 32.

Hexadecimal literals that pass the address checksum test, for example 0xdCad3a6d3569DF655070DEd06cb7A1b2Ccd1D3AF are of address type. Hexadecimal literals that are between 39 and 41 digits long and do not pass the checksum test produce an error. You can prepend (for integer types) or append (for bytesNN types) zeros to remove the error.

#### # Rational and Integer Literals

Integer literals are formed from a sequence of digits in the range 0-9. They are interpreted as decimals. For example, 69 means sixty nine. Octal literals do not exist in Solidity and leading zeros are invalid.

#### # String Literals and Types

String literals are written with either double or single-quotes ("foo" or 'bar'), and they can also be split into multiple consecutive parts ("foo" "bar" is equivalent to "foobar") which can be helpful when dealing with long strings. They do not imply trailing zeroes as in C; "foo" represents three bytes, not four. As with integer literals, their type can vary, but they are implicitly convertible to bytes1, …, bytes32, if they fit, to bytes and to string

#### # Unicode Literals

While regular string literals can only contain ASCII, Unicode literals – prefixed with the keyword unicode – can contain any valid UTF-8 sequence. They also support the very same escape sequences as regular string literals.

Hexadecimal literals are prefixed with the keyword hex and are enclosed in double or single-quotes (hex"001122FF", hex'0011_22_FF'). Their content must be hexadecimal digits which can optionally use a single underscore as separator between byte boundaries. The value of the literal will be the binary representation of the hexadecimal sequence.

#### # Enums

Enums are one way to create a user-defined type in Solidity. They are explicitly convertible to and from all integer types but implicit conversion is not allowed. The explicit conversion from integer checks at runtime that the value lies inside the range of the enum and causes a Panic error otherwise. Enums require at least one member, and its default value when declared is the first member. Enums cannot have more than 256 members.

#### # Function Types

Function types are the types of functions. Variables of function type can be assigned from functions and function parameters of function type can be used to pass functions to and return functions from function calls. Function types come in two flavours - internal and external functions:

Internal functions can only be called inside the current contract (more specifically, inside the current code unit, which also includes internal library functions and inherited functions) because they cannot be executed outside of the context of the current contract. Calling an internal function is realized by jumping to its entry label, just like when calling a function of the current contract internally.

External functions consist of an address and a function signature and they can be passed via and returned from external function calls.

### # Reference Types

Values of reference type can be modified through multiple different names. Contrast this with value types where you get an independent copy whenever a variable of value type is used. Because of that, reference types have to be handled more carefully than value types. Currently, reference types comprise structs, arrays and mappings. If you use a reference type, you always have to explicitly provide the data area where the type is stored: memory (whose lifetime is limited to an external function call), storage (the location where the state variables are stored, where the lifetime is limited to the lifetime of a contract) or calldata (special data location that contains the function arguments).

An assignment or type conversion that changes the data location will always incur an automatic copy operation, while assignments inside the same data location only copy in some cases for storage types.

#### # Arrays

Arrays can have a compile-time fixed size, or they can have a dynamic size.

The type of an array of fixed size k and element type T is written as T[k], and an array of dynamic size as T[].

For example, an array of 5 dynamic arrays of uint is written as uint[][5]. The notation is reversed compared to some other languages. In Solidity, X[3] is always an array containing three elements of type X, even if X is itself an array. This is not the case in other languages such as C.

Indices are zero-based, and access is in the opposite direction of the declaration.

#### # Structs

Solidity provides a way to define new types in the form of structs, which is shown in the following example:

struct Funder {

Mapping types use the syntax mapping(_KeyType => _ValueType) and variables of mapping type are declared using the syntax mapping(_KeyType => _ValueType) _VariableName. The_KeyType can be any built-in value type, bytes, string, or any contract or enum type. Other user-defined or complex types, such as mappings, structs or array types are not allowed. _ValueType can be any type, including mappings, arrays and structs.
You can think of mappings as hash tables, which are virtually initialised such that every possible key exists and is mapped to a value whose byte-representation is all zeros, a type’s default value. The similarity ends there, the key data is not stored in a mapping, only its keccak256 hash is used to look up the value.