What do you mean by 'data type' in programming?

A data type in programming is a characteristic that defines the set of values a variable can take, as well as the operations that can be performed on these values.

For example, in Python, there are data types:

• Numbers (int, float)
• Strings (str)
• Boolean values (bool)
• Lists (list)
• Dictionaries (dict)

The data type helps the compiler or interpreter understand how to process the data and how much memory to allocate.

Example:

x = 10      # x is an integer (int)
name = "Ivan"  # name is a string (str)
flag = True  # flag is a boolean value (bool)