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This is a past exam question and I was wondering what a primitive type and reference type are first off? With an array I know the a reference type is where the array is composed of objects or variables, but a primitive type is where you would create the array with just int or strings. (right?)
How do you think you would answer the question on the test and be given good credit? Without really referring directly to an primitive ARRAY type... Is there a way to do it without that? Or do you think it would be fine to just explain it with the array.
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Primitive values are data that are stored on the stack. Primitive value is stored directly in the location that the variable accesses. Reference values are objects that are stored in the heap. Reference value stored in the variable location is a pointer to a location in memory where the object is stored.
int , float , double , long , short , boolean and char are examples of primitive data types. You can't invoke methods on these data types and they don't have a high memory footprint, which is their striking difference from classes. Everything else is a class (or class-like in the case of interfaces and enums).
From book OCA JAVA SE 7
Just as men and women are fundamentally different (according to John Gray, author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus), primitive variables and object reference variables differ from each other in multiple ways. The basic difference is that primitive variables store the actual values, whereas reference variables store the addresses of the objects they refer to. Let’s assume that a class Person is already defined. If you create an int variable a, and an object reference variable person, they will store their values in memory as shown in figure 2.13.
int a = 77; Person person = new Person(); 
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