Name (computer science)

content moved from variable; need to write an actual article..

Variables are referred to by a name which is used to refer to its contents. A variable's name can contain text and numbers, but there are restrictions to avoid problems in lexical analysis. For example, a variable in C might be called height or numberOfCats or cow_name. In some languages or programming practices, the name of a variable can tell you what kind of values you might find in it. For instance, in Fortran, the first letter in a variable's name indicates whether by default it is created as an integer or floating point variable. In BASIC, the suffix $ on a variable name indicates that its value is a string. Perl uses the prefixes $, @, %, and & to indicate scalar, array, hash, and subroutine variables. In Common Lisp, variables' names are not strings, but symbols -- a special data type. See also identifier.