$ in identifiers -- poll

[J.S.Schwarz]

-- 

> 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