equates: what are they?

[Benjamin]

I'm sure the answer to my question is in the manual, but I can't find it, so I'll ask: What is an equate?

[Benjamin]

Constants?

[Benjamin]

Yes, they are constants.

[Petr Schreiber]

Yes, basically constants with a syntactic sugar to make their declaration shorter.

You can also declare constant as:

Const MyText As String = "Ciao"

...very handy is then also this construct:

BEGIN CONST
  %MyValue = 1
  %MyOtherValue
  %MyFinalValue
END CONST

...this will automatically assign value of 2 to %MyOtherValue and value of 3 to %MyFinalValue.

Original equates are inspired by languages such as PowerBASIC, while CONST & BEGIN CONST were added later.

There are some tricks you can do with equates, like:

$MYTEXT = "Hello"

MsgBox 0, %MYTEXT(3) ' Will display "HelloHelloHello" - just syntactical sugar, handy especially for pre-defined equates such as $TAB or $CRLF

Petr