Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site sftri.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxj!mhuxm!sftig!sftri!jss From: jss@sftri.UUCP (J.S.Schwarz) Newsgroups: net.lang.c Subject: Re: $ in identifiers -- poll Message-ID: <260@sftri.UUCP> Date: Wed, 5-Dec-84 11:43:13 EST Article-I.D.: sftri.260 Posted: Wed Dec 5 11:43:13 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 6-Dec-84 06:45:13 EST References: <3@aeolus.UUCP> Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Summit N.J. Lines: 24 -- > I'd like to bring up the matter of using '$' in C identifiers. Here are > several points of view I've come across: > > What does the standard say about this? '$' is not used anywhere else in C. > I think its use as a letter should be officially permitted. (It makes a > nice "package" identifier, c.f. VMS.) The latest (Oct 31) ANSI draft that I have does not include '$' as a character in identifiers. It should be pointed out that many preprocessors (such as YACC) use '$' in some way to distinguish "special" identifiers. It would cause confusion if '$' was now made legal in ordinary C identifiers. Looking at my keyboard, the characters not currently used by C (outside of comments and strings) are '@', '$', and backquote(`). If you really need a new nonalphabetic character in identifiers I would suggest backquote. Identifiers like xyz`p look nice to me. (But personally, I see no need for such a modification to the language definition.) Jerry Schwarz ihnp4!btlunix!jss