Variables

Possibly the most common programming concept is the concept of values. Values can be text or numbers that you can think of. What is your name? What is your age? The answers to those questions are their values.

You can think of variables as a named box for a value. That is the "name" in the question "What is your name". If someone asks me "What is your name?" I would answer "Eyzi". In this case, name is the variable and Eyzi is the value.

If you're making a fighting game, you might want to have a variable for player health. If so, you would use a variable accordingly.

Some types of values that are built into the language, often called primitive values, are characters (letters), numbers, boolean (true of false), or a collection of any of these.

String

A single character usually counts as a single value. A text, then, is treated more like a collection of characters. This collection is most commonly referred to as a string in the programming world.

When we refer to character or string values, we usually enclose them in quotation marks to differentiate it from a keyword. For example, if a programming language reserved quit to exit the program, we can use "quit" to let the computer know that this should be treated as a text value and not ran as a keyword.

Constants

Constants are also named boxes of values, except these are usually values that will never change. For example, minutes in an hour.

These are not restricted to universal values. There may be some constants that are specific to your application. Life, if you are creating a todo app and you know that you will ever need "TODO" and "DONE" states, they can be set as constants as well.

Assignment

Assignment is a statement that attaches a value to a variable. Languages have an assignment operator that handles this. Usually it's just the plain old equality symbol (=).

name = "Eyzi";

Doing this, we create our own . One that is not built into the programming language but we can use for our own purposes. We can now use the keyword name wherever we need it.

Types

As mentioned above, there are what's known as primitive types. In some languages, you may need to specify the type when creating a variable.

int age = 9;

int in this case is short for integer so the computer knows that they variable age is of type number.