I have an exam question from a past paper that I'm trying to answer:
Discuss variables of type primitive, reference and static in the context of a programming language. Give suitable examples [8].
The answer I have so far is:
A primitive type is an object which the language has given a predefined value. These types include int, bool and float. Reference type objects refer to these primitive types in a particular sequence when instantiated. Examples of these are strings and arrays. The static keyword, when assigned to a variable, means that there is only one instance of this variable and the value assigned applies to all references of the variable.
I'm fairly new to programming so I don't know if this is exactly right, so if anyone could give me some tips on how to improve the mark I would get for this question I'd greatly appreciate it.
A primitive type is an object which the language has given a predefined value
Why? Even references can have predefined values as noted. For primitive (built in) types you may want to say these are types that a language provides built in support for. What your instructor might be glad to hear about is if you say that most primitive types are also value types in C# and you might want to discuss value types semantics (e.g., value type variable directly contains value - whereas a reference variable just contains an address to some object in memory).
About reference types again you may say that a reference variable doesn't contain the value or object directly - rather just a reference to it. Now again you may want to discuss reference semantics. For example if you have two reference variables pointing to same object - and you change the object from one reference change will be visible from another reference too - because both references point to same object. This is not the case with value types. If you assign same value type object to two different value type variables and change one variable - this change will not be visible in the second value type variable because each of them holds the value directly (e.g. each will have its own copy of the value type variable it was assigned to).
Static types you have already described.