>>106577985
Even better are variable constants. Fortran passes all function parameters as references, if you passed a constant into a function it would have to pass in the address of that constant which had to be stored somewhere in memory. On some early compilers, if you passed a constant (e.g. 0) to a function which wound up assigning a value to that parameter, this would result in all occurrences of that constant (e.g. 0) in the program changing to the new value (e.g. 42), leading to some really fascinating and fun bugs.

>>106577985
aka a Label, name, or definition