Re: Characters Allowed in Symbols
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg37857] Re: Characters Allowed in Symbols
- From: adam.smith at hillsdale.edu (Adam Smith)
- Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 01:35:53 -0500 (EST)
- References: <ar0102$b7k$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Hermann, This is an excellent question. I hope someone has a comprehensive list. I personally have not seen one. I do have one specific example: the underline "_" character. In my "ancient" FORTRAN computer codes I got in the habit of representing some subscripts and spaces with the underline character "_". For example the inital time in many physics formula is given as t with a zero subscript and I would use "t_0" to represent this. In order to set it equal to 10.0 seconds, I might have t_0 = 10.0 in the code. Or if I wanted a long descriptive name like "approx Pi" assigned the value 3.14, I would use approx_Pi = 3.14 Mathematica uses the "_" in representing patterns so these statements generate error messages. I vaguely remember someone providing a work around, but I decided it was not worth the trouble and just learned to avoid the "_" character. Hope you find this helpful. Adam Smith "Hermann Schmitt" <schmitther at netcologne.de> wrote in message news:<ar0102$b7k$1 at smc.vnet.net>... > Hello, > On page 1000 of the Mathematica book you can read: > "The name of a symbol must be a sequence of letters, letter-like symbols and > digits". > My question is: What letter-like forms are allowed? > Apparently "$" is allowed, additionally, I found, that "§" is allowed. > Are there yet other characters, which are allowed? > My aim is to use symbols in my package, which do not interfere with symbols, > which the user wants to define. > Hermann Schmitt