What is the point of a constant in C#

Posted by Adam on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Adam
Published on 2010-03-28T04:08:50Z Indexed on 2010/03/28 4:13 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 244

Filed under:

c#

|

constants

Can anyone tell what is the point of a constant in C#?

For example, what is the advantage of doing

cosnt int months = 12;

as opposed to

int months = 12;

I get that constants can't be changed, but then why not just... not change it's value after you initialize it?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about c#

.NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve run into the problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy:… >>> More
HttpWebRequest and Ignoring SSL Certificate Errors

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Man I can't believe this. I'm still mucking around with OFX servers and it drives me absolutely crazy how some these servers are just so unbelievably misconfigured. I've recently hit three different 3 major brokerages which fail HTTP validation with bad or corrupt certificates at least according to… >>> More
The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot… >>> More
Dynamic Type to do away with Reflection

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
The dynamic type in C# 4.0 is a welcome addition to the language. One thing I’ve been doing a lot with it is to remove explicit Reflection code that’s often necessary when you ‘dynamically’ need to walk and object hierarchy. In the past I’ve had a number of ReflectionUtils that used string based expressions… >>> More
Finding a Relative Path in .NET

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Here’s a nice and simple path utility that I’ve needed in a number of applications: I need to find a relative path based on a base path. So if I’m working in a folder called c:\temp\templates\ and I want to find a relative path for c:\temp\templates\subdir\test.txt I want to receive back subdir\test… >>> More

Related posts about constants

The purpose of using a constants pool for immutable constants

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
Originally posted at stackoverflow.com/q/23961260 I come across the following code with a lot of frequency: if (myArray.length == Constants.ZERO_INT) or if (myString != null && !myString.equals(Constants.EMPTY_STRING)) Neither of these makes much sense to me. Isn't the point of… >>> More
Js constants with variables inside.

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I know I'm able to this in PHP, but I can't remember the name or the way to do it, so I'll just explain what it is, and when someone tells me how it's called I'll update this question. I have some error messages defined as constants on javascript, however, some of those messages need to contain dynamic… >>> More
Why can't Perl's DBD::DB2 find dbivport.h during installation?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
We are using a Perl utility to dump data from DB2 database. We installed DBI package and it is asking for DBD package also. We dont have root access and when we try to install DBD package we are getting the following error: ERROR BUILDING DB2.pm [lijumathew@intblade03 DBD-DB2-1.78]$ make make[1]:… >>> More
DBI::DBD package not getting installed for Perl?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi, We are using a Perl utility to dump data from DB2 database. We installed DBI package and it is asking for DBD package also. We dont have root access and when we try to install DBD package we are getting the following error. ERROR BUILDING DB2.pm [lijumathew@intblade03 DBD-DB2-1.78]$ make make[1]:… >>> More
Java enums vs constants for Strings

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I've switched from using constants for Strings: public static final String OPTION_1 = "OPTION_1"; ... to enums: public enum Options { OPTION_1; } With constants, you'd just refer to the constant: String s = TheClass.OPTION_1 But with Enums, you have to specify toString(): String… >>> More