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Re: what's in a name? (legal and conventional constructions of identifiers)

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg119841] Re: what's in a name? (legal and conventional constructions of identifiers)
• From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
• Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2011 05:27:38 -0400 (EDT)

On 6/24/11 at 7:47 AM, alan.isaac at gmail.com (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 $.

The information you want is in the documentation just not in the
subset you looked at.

Look at

<http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/BasicObjects.html>

Additional information about Mathematica language can be found
by following the links at

<http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/LanguageStructureOverview.html>

Note, it is valid in Mathematica to end a variable name with $.
But given Mathematica creates variables at various times ending
with a $, it is unwise to end your variable names with $ since
that could lead to name conflicts.