22. Planning Your Variables

INSTRUCTOR NOTE:

Here "#" = "number"

In programming languages a constant is a value that is never changed or modified during the course of the program. In Java you can force a value not to be changed by using the keyword final. For example:

final int POINTS_FOR_FREE_THROW = 1;

Then if you wrote the following, you'd get an error:

POINTS_FOR_FREE_THROW = 100;

Note, by convention, constants have all capitalized letters in their names. Also, instead of spaces or camel-case, underscores are used between words. You can declare variables as constants to keep yourself from accidentally changing the value of a variable.
For a more detailed explanation of final variables, check out Wikipedia and here.