RE: Characters Allowed in Symbols
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg37844] RE: [mg37839] Characters Allowed in Symbols
- From: "Wolf, Hartmut" <Hartmut.Wolf at t-systems.com>
- Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 01:34:51 -0500 (EST)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
>-----Original Message----- >From: Hermann Schmitt [mailto:schmitther at netcologne.de] To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net >Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2002 12:12 PM >To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net >Subject: [mg37844] [mg37839] Characters Allowed in Symbols > > >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 > > Hermann, here I entered a few (obviously) "letter-like forms" from the palette Complete Characters: In[1]:= {a, \[Alpha], \[ScriptA], \[GothicA], \[DoubleStruckA], à, \[Angstrom], \ \[Wolf], EUR, \[DotlessI], ?, \[UnderBrace], \[AltKey]} In[2]:= Names["Global`*"] Out[2]= {"a", "à", "\[DotlessI]", "\[ScriptA]", "\[GothicA]", "\[DoubleStruckA]", "\ \[Alpha]", "\[AltKey]", "\[Angstrom]", "?", "EUR", "\[Wolf]", "\[UnderBrace]"} In[3]:= nnames = % In[4]:= inputs = %%% In[5]:= NameQ /@ nnames Out[5]= {True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True} In[6]:= Sort[inputs] === Symbol /@ nnames Out[6]= True In[8]:= MapThread[Set, {inputs, Range[Length[nnames]]}] Out[8]= {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13} In[9]:= Symbol /@ nnames Out[9]= {1, 6, 10, 3, 4, 5, 2, 13, 7, 11, 9, 8, 12} In[10]:= ?*\[AltKey]/\[DoubleStruckA]/EUR*\[Wolf] Out[10]= 1144/45 So, as I cannot precisely answer your question, I'd say: quite a lot. My guess is: all stuff under "Letters" and most under "Letter-like Forms", which is not predefined and protected, that is. It should not be too difficult to find out for a case given. -- Hartmut Wolf P.S.: After all, this is determined by the Mathematica Parser, so my guess above might not be a 100% correct.