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

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg119873] Re: what's in a name? (legal and conventional constructions of identifiers)
• From: Armand Tamzarian <mike.honeychurch at gmail.com>
• Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2011 07:31:39 -0400 (EDT)
• References: <iu1tsu$9ma$1@smc.vnet.net>

On Jun 24, 9:54 pm, Alan <alan.is... at gmail.com> wrote:
> I find the documentation athttp://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/DefiningVariables.html
> to be completely inadequate.  Is there a better place to look?
>
> Comparehttp://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

Mathematica needs to handle subscripted variables much easier given
that this is a "natural" way to define variables. I recently used
another package where it was totally natural (out of the box, no
loading packages etc.). It was quite a shock to see how further
advanced they were in this area.

Mike