As many of the preceding examples have shown, a variable must be
declared before it can be used, otherwise an undefined name error
will be generated. A variable is declared using the variable
keyword, e.g,
variable x, y, z;
x, y, and z. This
is an example of a variable declaration statement, and like all
statements, it must end in a semicolon.
Variables declared this way are untyped and inherit a type upon assignment. As such, type-checking of function arguments, etc is performed at run-time. For example,
x = "This is a string";
x = 1.2;
x = 3;
x = 2i;
0+2i). Any attempt to use
a variable before it has acquired a type will result in an
uninitialized variable error.
It is legal to put executable code in a variable declaration list. That is,
variable x = 1, y = sin (x);
Variables are classified as either global or local. A
variable declared inside a function is said to be local and has no
meaning outside the function. A variable is said to be global if
it was declared outside a function. Global variables are further
classified as being public, static, or private,
according to the namespace where they were defined. See
the chapter on
Namespaces for more information about namespaces.
The following global variables are predefined by the language and
live in the public namespace. They are mainly used as
convenience variables:
$0 $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6 $7 $8 $9
An intrinsic variable is another type of global variable.
Such variables have a definite type which cannot be altered.
Variables of this type may also be defined to be read-only, or
constant variables. An example of an intrinsic variable is
PI which is a read-only double precision variable with a value
of approximately 3.14159265358979323846.