This International Standard specifies the nomenclature and shared semantics for a collection of datatypes commonly occurring in programming languages and software interfaces, referred to as the General-Purpose Datatypes (GPD). It specifies both primitive datatypes, in the sense of being defined ab initio without reference to other datatypes, and non-primitive datatypes, in the sense of being wholly or partly defined in terms of other datatypes. The specification of datatypes in this International Standard is “general-purpose” in the sense that the datatypes specified are classes of datatype of which the actual datatypes used in programming languages and oth