Variables are data containers, which, as the name implies, can get their data changed through assignment operations. If you want to store some data, you will use a variable. The basic syntax is:

    var myVariable = initialValue

where var is the keyword telling the compiler we're defining a new variable, myVariable is the variable's name, which cannot be a reserved word like var as we said previously. = initialValue is used to assign an initial value to the variable. This is optional, and if omitted, the variable's value will be null, a special value that means the variable holds nothing. A key difference in other languages like C is that primitive variables don't need the user to define their type, you can do

    var myVar = "Hello World"
    myVar = 1

Without any sort of error. Even though this will work with any sort of var type, we will see futher on that it can cause issues when our variables hold objects and we try to access its methods or such, but we will expand on this later.

As we said previously, variables can hold primitive data such as numbers, letters, booleans, but they can also hold objects, which is fundamental for an Object Oriented language like DM. Say you have an /obj/honk object, you're fully able to assign it to a type-less var as we did before with our string and number, but you won't be able to actually access any of the object's data. For now, just remember that the syntax for typecasting is:

    var/your/type/varname = initialValue