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Symbolic Constants
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Symbolic Constants
BASIC provides symbolic constants that can be used in place of numeric or
string values. The following fragment declares two symbolic constants and
uses one to dimension an array:
CONST MAXCHARS% = 254, MAXBUF% = MAXCHARS% + 1
DIM Buffer%(MAXBUF%)
The name of a symbolic constant follows the same rules as a BASIC variable
name. You may include a type-declaration character (%, &, #, !, @, or $)
in the name to indicate its type, but this character is not part of the name.
For example, after the following declaration, the names N!, N#, N$, N%, N&,
and N@ cannot be used as variable names because they have the same name as
the constant:
CONST N=45
A constant's type is determined either by an explicit type-declaration
character or the type of the expression. Symbolic constants are unaffected
by DEFtype statements.
If you omit the type-declaration character, the constant is given a type
based on the expression. Strings always yield a string constant. With
numeric expressions, the expression is evaluated and the constant is given
the simplest type that can represent it. For example, if the expression
gives a result that can be represented as an integer, the constant is given
an integer type.