PASCAL: AN INTRODUCTION

VARIABLE NAMES
Variable names are a maximum of 32 alphanumeric characters. Some Pascal versions only recognise the first eight characters. The first letter of the data name must be ALPHABETIC (ie A to Z ). Lowercase characters ( a to z ) are treated as uppercase. Examples of variable names are,

	RATE_OF_PAY      HOURS_WORKED   B41   X   y   Home_score

Give variables meaningful names, which will help to make the program easier to read and follow. This simplifies the task of error correction.

ASSIGNING VALUES TO VARIABLES
Having declared a variable, you often want to make it equal to some value. In pascal, the special operator

:=

provides a means of assigning a value to a variable. The following portion of code, which appeared earlier, illustrates this.


	var number1, number2, number3 : integer;
	begin
		number1 := 43;   { make number1 equal to 43 decimal }
		number2 := 34;   { make number2 equal to 34 decimal }
		number3 := number1 + number2;  { number3 equals 77  }

When assigning values to char vari