Types

A type describes the data type of a value. Motoko has static types. This means that the type of every value is known when the Motoko code is being compiled.

Motoko can in many cases know the type of a variable without you doing anything:

let x = true;

In the example above the true value of variable name x has the Bool type. We did not state this explicitly but Motoko infers this information automatically for us.

In some cases the type is not obvious and we need to add the type ourselves. This is called type annotation. We can annotate the name of the variable like this:

let x : Bool = true;

With the colon : and the name of the type after the variable name, we tell Motoko that x is of type Bool.

We can also annotate the value:

let x = true : Bool;

Or both:

let x : Bool = true : Bool;

In this case it is unnecessary and makes the code ugly. The convention is to leave spaces around the colon.

The type keyword

We can always rename any type by using the type keyword. We could rename the Bool type to B:

type B = Bool;

let boolean : B = true;

We defined a new alias for the Bool type and named it B. We then declare a variable booelan of type B.

Primitive types

Primitive types are fundamental core data types that are not composed of more fundamental types. Some common ones in Motoko are:

• Bool
• Nat
• Int
• Float
• Text
• Principal
• Blob

See the full list of all Motoko data types

We can define arbitrary names for any type:

type Age = Nat;

This creates an alias (a second name) Age for the Nat type. This is useful for writing clear readable code. The convention is to use type names that start with a capital letter.

The variable name age is of type Age.

The unit type

The last type we will mention in this chapter is the unit type (). This type is also called the empty tuple type. It's useful in several places, for example in functions to indicate that a function does not return any specific type.

For now let's just look at one ugly, strange and useless, yet legal Motoko code example for the sake of learning:

let unitType : () = () : ();

We declared a variable named unitType and type annotated this variable name with the unit type. Then we assigned the empty tuple value () to it and also annotated this value with the unit type.

Observe that we type annotate twice, once on the left hand side of the assignment and the other on the right hand side, like we did for variable x above.