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A numeric constant stands for a number. This number can be an integer, a decimal fraction, or a number in scientific (exponential) notation.31 Here are some examples of numeric constants that all have the same value:
105 1.05e+2 1050e-1
A string constant consists of a sequence of characters enclosed in double quotation marks. For example:
"parrot"
represents the string whose contents are ‘parrot’. Strings in
gawk can be of any length, and they can contain any of the possible
eight-bit ASCII characters, including ASCII NUL (character code zero).
Other awk
implementations may have difficulty with some character codes.
The internal representation of all numbers, including integers, uses double-precision floating-point numbers. On most modern systems, these are in IEEE 754 standard format. See Arbitrary Precision Arithmetic, for much more information.