8.5 Literals

A numeric literal is an integer number explicity typed in a Cows script, such as 5 or 72.

A string literal is a string explicity typed in a Cows script; string literals must be enclosed within double quotes (e.g. "Vivisection is murder"), single quotes (e.g. 'Meat is murder') or backquotes (e.g. `Hunting is murder`).

Please note that 5 and "5" are different literals: the former is a number, the latter a string containing a single character.

Unlike other languages, there's no difference between single quotes, double quotes or backquotes unless you want to store quotes inside your string. Consider the following literal:

"Somebody said: "Vivisection is murder""

This expression is wrong: as Cows reaches the double quotes after the colon it will interpret them as the end of the string and raise an error in front of the unknown token Vivisection. So you need to escape these characters:

"Somebody said: \"Vivisection is murder\""

In practice, the backslash tells Cows that the following character must be interpreted as is, without giving it the meaning of end-of-string. If you prefer, you can use the single quotes to delimitate the string, so you don't need escape sequences since there are no more ambiguities:

'Somebody said: "Vivisection is murder"'

You can choose among the three quoting styles the one which avoid (or reduce) escape sequences your sources will be more readable.

HTML is full of double quotes, so when displaying large amounts of HTML code you'll probably prefer the single quotes or double quotes approach. I usually use backquotes since they are not likely to appear in your strings (unless you're writing a bash scripting tutorial ...)

Within a literal string you can insert other Escape Sequences which are interpreted by Cows according to the following rules.