Constants
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Beginners Area/Constants
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| Need to clarify something ( since searching using the word "constants kills the engine") Apart from good practice of using constants where a variable will never change in the program. What other benefits does a programmer get? Some ideas I assume may be correct is less memory allocation? Like a constant will never change, therefore less memory will be allocated. Perhaps from this a VERY small improvement in performance? Cheers mango |
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| Readability... Instead of coding magic numbers and potentially making mistakes, you can define constants and make your code much easier to debug/maintain later... e.g. Const ETunpickable = 0 Const ETsphere = 1 Const ETpolygon = 2 Const ETbox = 3 EntityPickMode bombmesh, ETsphere EntityPickMode cloud, ETunpickable EntityPickMode debris, ETpolygon I think it is far easier to work out what is intended here than the more terse... EntityPickMode bombmesh, 1 EntityPickMode cloud, 0 EntityPickMode debris, 2 Come back to your code in a few months time and see how much sense the second version makes !?! Just be careful to type the constants correctly, otherwise you introduce a lot of zero-valued magic numbers exactly where you don't expect them. |
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