Using DEFAULT

You can use the keyword DEFAULT rather than that of the assignment operator to initialize the variables. For e.g. the declaration
blood_type CHAR := ’O’;

it can be rewrite as follows:

blood_type CHAR DEFAULT ’O’;

Use DEFAULT for the variables that have a typical value. Use the assignment operator for the variables (like counters & accumulators) which have no typical value. Some of the examples are shown below:

hours_worked INTEGER DEFAULT 40;
employee_count INTEGER := 0;

You can also use DEFAULT to initialize the cursor parameters, subprogram parameters,  and fields in a user-defined record.