>Having cut my teeth in the old days when every extra byte mattered, eventually I learned that "the industry" doesn't care as much as we do about efficiency. HTML, for example, is terribly inefficient in its use of bandwidth yet we all seem to tolerate that. Use of #DEFINE vs variables is unlikely to match the resource use of a busy HTML page.
>
>You're right, if a frequently referenced constant is large you may be much better off putting it in a variable. If it's very large, a memo might be an even better idea. Apart from that, it's down to style. Neither is easier than the other; the main difference is that variables definitely create extra entries in the name table, though changes Calvin made to the name table in one of the iterations made this less of an event. Who knows- perhaps this is a throwback to the days when we had 128 bytes total and felt obliged to conserve every one of them. ;-)

Well, you couldn't be unjust and conserve only, say, last 28 bytes after having squandered the first 120, or conserve only odd ones while being like a drunk baron with the even ones... it's every one of them or nothing.