Next: , Previous: Symbolic Constants, Up: Expressions


3.10.3 Symbol Names

Unless quoted, symbol names start with a letter, underscore, or period and may include letters, digits, underscores, periods, and hyphens. Unquoted symbol names must not conflict with any keywords. You can specify a symbol which contains odd characters or has the same name as a keyword by surrounding the symbol name in double quotes:

     "SECTION" = 9;
     "with a space" = "also with a space" + 10;

Since symbols can contain many non-alphabetic characters, it is safest to delimit symbols with spaces. For example, ‘A-B’ is one symbol, whereas ‘A - B’ is an expression involving subtraction.