Re: what's in a name? (legal and conventional constructions of identifiers)
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg119842] Re: what's in a name? (legal and conventional constructions of identifiers)
- From: Michael Stern <nycstern at gmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2011 05:27:49 -0400 (EDT)
Also, you can't start a variable name with a number. "happy1" is ok, but "1happy" is not. On 6/24/2011 7:47 AM, Alan wrote: > I find the documentation at http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/DefiningVariables.html > to be completely inadequate. Is there a better place to look? > > Compare http://docs.python.org/reference/lexical_analysis.html#identifiers > > The main thing I want to understand is i. what special keyboard characters are allowed, and ideally ii. what naming practices are conventional. I think the rough answer for the ASCII character set is that the $ is the only special character that is allowed, but you should not end a name with it. Is that right? (I'm aware of the camelCase convention.) > > Hints that are not in the above documentation but clearly should be are: do not use underscores in variable names, do not use subscripts in variable names (perhaps with a discussion of Symbolize), and do not end a variable name with $. > > Thanks, > Alan > > >