This separation is useful for two purposes. First of all menu's are often used to select some value. For example a colour in a drawing tool. In this case the colour object is used as a value, while an all-1's image with is used as label and menu_item<->colour is set to menu_item<->value. When the user selects a menu-item, the colour object to be used may be read directly from the menu_item<->value object of the menu_item.

Second, this mechanism may be used to implement multi-language interfaces. In this case the menu_item<->value represents the internal name used by the program and the menu_item<->label the external name that may be in a different language.

The default menu_item<->label is compute from the initial menu_item<->value using menu_item<-default_label.

See also

- menu_item<-default_label
- menu_item-label