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.