I'm reading the book "Data Structures Using C , and one of the things the book explains is that a set of bits has no intrinsic meaning, and that the meaning of a given set of bits is given to this set from the way it is interpreted, so the same bit set can be interpreted as integers, numbers floating point, or characters. At least that's what I understood.
Later on the book explains that when declaring a variable in a language such as C, for example, the type of that variable is used by the compiler to instruct the machine how to interpret the bits stored in the memory address allocated by that variable.
What puzzled me is when the author states that we can see the concept of "data types" differently, not in terms of what the computer can do, but what the user wants it to do, and that once the data type concept is distanced from the hardware capabilities the data types that can be considered are unlimited.This is where the statement "A data type is an abstract concept defined by a set of logical properties."
What is the meaning of this statement? So far I have not been able to absorb this concept.
In this section, the following is followed: "Once such an abstract data type is defined and the legal operations involving that type are specified, we may implement that data type (or a close approximation to it)." >