TAL Reference Manual

LITERALs and DEFINEs

TAL Reference Manual—526371-001

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Usage Considerations

The compiler allocates no storage for LITERAL constants. It substitutes the constant at

each occurrence of the identifier.

You access a LITERAL constant by using its identifier in declarations and statements.

LITERAL identifiers make the source code more readable. For example, identifiers

such as BUFFER_LENGTH and TABLE_SIZE are more meaningful than their

respective constant values of 80 and 128.

Examples of LITERAL Declarations

1. This example specifies a constant for each identifier:

LITERAL true = -1,

false = 0,

buffer_length = 80,

table_size = 128,

table_base = %1000,

entry_size = 4,

timeout = %100000D,

CR = %15,

LF = %12;

2. This example specifies no numeric constants; the compiler supplies all the

constants:

LITERAL a, -- The compiler assigns 0

b, -- The compiler assigns 1

c; -- The compiler assigns 2