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Typed constants serve to provide a program with initialized variables.
Contrary to ordinary constants, they may be assigned to at run-time.
The difference with normal variables is that their value is initialised
when the program starts, whereas normal variables must be initialised
explicitly.
Typed constant declaration
Given the declaration:
Const
S : String = 'This is a typed constant string';
The following is a valid assignment:
S := 'Result : '+Func;
Where Func is a function that returns a String.
Typed constants also allow you to initialize arrays and records. For arrays,
the initial elements must be specified, surrounded by round brackets, and
separated by commas. The number of elements must be exactly the same as
number of elements in the declaration of the type.
As an example:
Const
tt : array [1..3] of string[20] = ('ikke', 'gij', 'hij');
ti : array [1..3] of Longint = (1,2,3);
For constant records, you should specify each element of the record, in the
form Field : Value, separated by commas, and surrounded by round
brackets.
As an example:
Type
Point = record
X,Y : Real
end;
Const
Origin : Point = (X:0.0 , Y:0.0);
The order of the fields in a constant record needs to be the same as in the type declaration,
otherwise you'll get a compile-time error.
root
1999-06-10