kind
There are three principal kinds of data objects, literals, constants, and variables.

literal
A literals is a specific numeric or string value. 23 is a numeric literal, while "hello" is a string literal. The many literal formats supported are described in the following pages.

numeric literal
A numeric literal is a specific numeric value represented in one of the following formats:

character literal 'x'  ASCII character between single quotes
integer literal 88110  decimal digits
decimal literal 88.110  decimal digits plus a decimal point
scientific literal . 88110d+5  decimal number with power of 10 exponent
hexadecimal literal 0xDEADC0DE  0x plus 0 to 16 hexadecimal digits
octal literal 0o37777777777  0o plus 0 to 22 octal digits
binary literal 0b0010100010101011  0b plus 0 to 64 binary digits
SINGLE image 0s3F880000  0s plus exactly 8 hexadecimal digits
DOUBLE image 0d4018000080000000  0d plus exactly 16 hexadecimal digits

character literal
Character literals are single ASCII characters enclosed in single quotes, like 'x' or '!'.  Simple backslash codes like '\a', '\n', '\V', '\\', and '\"' are also valid representations of non-printing characters.  The valid backslash codes are the single character backslash codes defined for string literals.  Character literals are unsigned bytes UBYTE.

Character literals are a convenient, efficient way to specify the numeric value of any single ASCII character.  'a' , '!', and '"' are equivalent to ASC("a") , ASC("!") , and ASC(CHR$(34)), but execute much faster.  Remember, character literals represent the ASCII value of characters, so '5' does not represent the number 5, but 0x35 or 53.  See Appendix A for character values of ASCII characters.  The following code segment illustrates character literals:

FUNCTION CheckChars (n$)              '
  FOR i = 1 TO LEN(n$)                ' for each character in n$
    v = ASC(n$, i)                    ' v = value of character #i
    SELECT CASE TRUE
      CASE (v >= 'A') AND (v <= 'Z') : PRINT "Upper case letter."
      CASE (v >= 'a') AND (v <= 'z') : PRINT "Lower case letter."
      CASE (v >= '0') AND (v <= '9') : PRINT "DECimal digit."
      CASE (v = '.')                  : PRINT "decimal point."
      CASE (v = '$')                  : PRINT "dollar sign."
      CASE (v = '\t')                 : PRINT "tab character."
      CASE (v = '\\')                 : PRINT "backslash character."
      CASE ELSE                       : PRINT "nothing interesting."
    END SELECT
  NEXT i
END FUNCTION