Values of basic type can be written down (denoted) in a program
text by denotations:
INT
Natural numbers can be written as a sequence of digits, e.g.
3, 198, 10000
are all three valid INT denotations.
Negative numbers can be written as expressions consisting of a
monadic minus operator and an INT denotation, e.g.
-57, as you might have suspected.
REAL
Elan admits the conventional fixed point and floating point
representation for (approximations) of real numbers,
like 3.1415269, 1.3e-8.
BOOL
There are only two values for truth values, which are denoted
by the constants TRUE and FALSE respectively.
People allergic to capital letters may use the concrete
standard constants true and false instead.
TEXT
Text denotations consist of sequences of characters
enclosed in quotation marks, e.g. "Hello world!"
All printable characters of your computer are allowed
within text denotations. If a quote character is to appear
in a text denotation, then it has te be doubled, e.g.
"He said ""Don't!"""
The empty text consisting of no characters is denoted by
"".