A fundamental data type that holds character information. A String variable is of either fixed or variable length, and contains one character per 2 bytes. Fixed-length strings are declared to be a specific length, and can contain 1 to approximately 64K (2^16) characters. Variable-length strings can be any length up to 2 billion (2^31) characters (approximately 64K (2^16) characters for Microsoft Windows version 3.1 and earlier), less a small amount of storage overhead. The type-declaration character is $ (ANSI character 36).