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Working with Constants

A constant is an unchangeable value that you name. Constants are useful if you have an unchanging value that comes up frequently in your program. For example, if you were writing a space shooter in which each alien blasted out of the sky is worth 150 points, you could define a constant named ALIEN_POINTS that is equal to 150. Then, any time you need the value of an alien, you could use ALIEN_POINTS instead of the literal 150.

Constants provide two important benefits. First, they make programs clearer. As soon as you see ALIEN_POINTS, you know what it means. If you were to look at some code and see 150, you might not know what the value represents. Second, constants make changes easy. For example, suppose you do some playtesting with your game and you decide that each alien should really be worth 250 points. With constants, all youd have to do is change the initialization of ALIEN_POINTS in your program. Without constants, youd have to hunt down every occurrence of 150 and change it to 250.


 

Introducing the Game Stats 3.0 ProgramUsing ConstantsUsing Enumerations