is this bit of syntactic weirdness a fpc element, or from delphi. I've largely been away from pascal since the early 90s, mostly only using it to write dos-y non-object-y utilities, for which it excels.

typed constants seem to basically to be like the static keyword from c.. but not a var modifier.. It just seems it should be a modifier for var. such as var st:string static;.. since.. constant is usually pretty wrapped up in the meaning of "not changing." and that it has a constant, initialized, reserved place in memory is.. well.. abstract. Especially since you can initialize your variables now, then the only thing that makes it special is that it is a global variable with a local scope.

I'm not the sort who thinks pascal should be C, because I hate having to work with C or it's work likes. I just think that being able to call something constant and change it muggles the syntactic clarity of the language, which is otherwise rather good.

Initialized constants are deprecated, and should be replaced by initialized variables, as in Delphi:

Var
  A : String = 'Some string';

"Real" constants (in the sense of 'not changing') do not need to be typed in the first place so

Const
  A = 'Some String';

Will do just fine. You now have both possibilities and they each have clear and unambiguous meaning.

Michael.

You can also give them a type by simply adding a typecast around the value. This can be necessary sometimes for range checking (e.g. longint($80000000)) or for overload selection.

Jonas

Michael Van Canneyt wrote

Initialized constants are deprecated, and should be replaced by initialized variables, as in Delphi:

They are? Why?

They have the practical advantage of being able to share them with other instances of this process. At least, if compiler+linker cooperate to put them in the right section.

Micha

I was less interested in the initialized part- which I'm happy you can do with variables now but would not be overly concerned setting them in code as I always had to in the past, as the "It should be stressed that typed constants are initialized at program start. This is also true of local typed constants." Which I take it to mean that they retain their value when out of scope, which provides encapsulation at a level that can only otherwise be done with objects.

like
function HowManyBirds:integer;
const n: integer = 1;
begin
   n:=n * 2;
end;

ignoring that the function here is useless, that's a useful ability.. while you can define variables anywhere not in procedure, nothing else quite does that. It's just I'd rather it be
var n: integer = 1; static;
var n: integer = 1; fixed;
or some such. It makes more sense linguistically, in an otherwise very sensible language. :)

Why don't you just type and initialize your constants? I'm doing it all the time like this (from a real world working program):

const
  H5FILE_NAME : string = 'SDS_P.h5';
  DATASETNAME : string = 'IntArray';

That should do what you want IIRC,
Marc