==Fundamental Types

Lense distinguishes primitive types from fundamental types. Fundamental types are those types the compiler can reason about and/or provide special support. Primitive types are those types that are not objects. In Java, for example, int is a primtitive type and all primitive types are also fundamental. However, String is also a fundamental type (as special support from the compiler and the runtime), but is not a primitive, since it is an object allocated in the heap derived from a class.

Lense supports several fundamental types, but does not support primitives. All things in Lense are objects.

Fundamental types receive support in two main forms: literals and directives. Many of the fundamental type have literal support in code and some fundamental types have special relevance in directives. For example, the if directive only works with expressions that evaluate to a Boolean, and the for directive only works on `Iterable`s.

Operators are not fundamental in Lense so when you write 2 + 3 this is not specific to numbers, any operator can be used in an class (if it implements a specific interface). For more on operators see Operator Overloading.

<ul> <li><a href="booleans.html">Boolean</a></li> <li><a href="strings.html">String</a></li> <li><a href="numbers.html">Number</a></li> <li><a href="binary.html">Binary</a></li> <li><a href="interval.html">Interval</a></li> <li><a href="iterable.html">Iterable</a></li> <li> Containers <ul> <li><a href="maybe.html">Maybe</a></li> <li><a href="tuples.html">Tuple</a></li>