This thread is for discussions of Data Types.

I have heard that using the smallest datatype in a program does not necessarily save space in memory, as memory is optimised to work in blocks of a certain size, possibly VB Long.

Is this correct, or is it best to use the smallest datatype that will safely hold the data required.

One important piece of advice, which I can confirm from experience, is:

Always use a large enough data type to allow for future growth.

You might expect that a variable to hold sales figures would never need to contain more than 99 million, but allow for even more, as it may need to hold, for example,  a company-wide summary of sales for the past twenty years, and suddenly the program will crash if the data type is too small.

i would be interested in a list of data-type-specific operators.  for example, in an if...then statement, what operator do i use to compare one string to another? what operator is used to multiply two numbers? etc.