Overview

Our next project is to consider all the major data types that LabVIEW supports. The list consists of scalar (single-element) types such as numerics and booleans and structured types (containing more than one element) such as strings, arrays, and clusters. The LabVIEW Controls palette is roughly organized around data types, gathering similar types into subpalettes for easy access. There are, in fact, many ways to present a given data type, and that's the main reason that there are apparently so many items in those palettes. For instance, a given numeric type can be displayed as a simple number, a bar graph, a slider, or an analog meter, or in a chart. But underneath is a well-defined representation of the data that you, the programmer, and the machine must mutually understand and agree upon as part of the programming process.

CLAD One thing that demonstrates that LabVIEW is a complete programming language is its support for essentially all data types. Numbers can be floating point or integer, with various degrees of precision. Booleans, bytes, strings, and numerics can be combined freely into various structures, giving you total freedom to make the data type suit the problem. Polymorphism is an important feature of LabVIEW that simplifies this potentially complicated world of data types into something that even the novice can manage without much study. Polymorphism is the ability to adjust to input data of different types. Most built-in LabVIEW functions are polymorphic. Ordinary virtual instruments (VIs)...