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