Types will be covered in more detail in the next chapter, but it is useful to give basic information here. C++ is a strongly typed language, which means that you have to declare the type of the variables that you use. The reason for this is that the compiler needs to know how much memory to allocate for the variable, and it can determine this by the type of the variable. In addition, the compiler needs to know how to initialize a variable, if it has not been explicitly initialized, and to perform this initialization the compiler needs to know the type of the variable.
C++11 provides the auto keyword, which relaxes this concept of strong typing, and it will be covered in the next chapter. However, the type checking ...
