5.5 Identifiers

An identifier (name) in C is a sequence of letters and digits, as well as ‘_’, that does not start with a digit. Most compilers also allow ‘$’. An identifier can be as long as you like; for example,

int anti_dis_establishment_arian_ism;

Letters in identifiers are case-sensitive in C; thus, a and A are two different identifiers.

Identifiers in C are used as variable names, function names, typedef names, enumeration constants, type tags, field names, and labels. Certain identifiers in C are keywords, which means they have specific syntactic meanings. Keywords in C are reserved words, meaning you cannot use them in any other way. For instance, you can’t define a variable or function named return or if.

You can also include other characters, even non-ASCII characters, in identifiers by writing their Unicode character names, which start with ‘\u’ or ‘\U’, in the identifier name. See Unicode Character Codes. However, it is usually a bad idea to use non-ASCII characters in identifiers, and when the names are written in English, they never need non-ASCII characters. See Write Programs in English!.

As stated above, whitespace is required to separate two consecutive identifiers, or to separate an identifier from a preceding or following numeric constant.