When Go to the first , previous , next , last section, table of contents . When This chapter is not really needed as all of its contents can be found elsewhere in this manual, but as people manage to become confused anyway, here's a summary. Note that in the former case, the data will be taken to be part of a DATA command, and may well lead to a syntax error. They don't affect variable expansion, so you have to enclose them in double quotes if you want to protect them. Strings are significant to the grammar so only use single quotes where they are needed.
Braces have syntactical significance, delimiting lists.
Wherever you can use braces you can use angle brackets. Parentheses don't turn off any sort of expansion, but can have syntactical significance. Expansion is turned off within single and double quotes and within braces. Because the expansion happens before the parser sees the input, variables cannot have any syntactical significance as the parser never knows about them. Evaluate the expression expr and substitute the resulting value.