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### 9.1 Introduction

Resource strings primarily exist to make internationalization of applications easier, by introducing a language construct that provides a uniform way of handling constant strings.

Most applications communicate with the user through some messages on the graphical screen or console. Storing these messages in special constants allows storing them in a uniform way in separate files, which can be used for translation. A programmers interface exists to manipulate the actual values of the constant strings at runtime, and a utility tool comes with the Free Pascal compiler to convert the resource string files to whatever format is wanted by the programmer. Both these things are discussed in the following sections.

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