Identifier Rules

• Source: https://www.freebasic.net/wiki/wikka.php?wakka=ProPgIdentifierRules
• Last revised: 2022-01-04

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Naming conventions for FreeBASIC symbols.

Description

An identifier is a symbolic name which uniquely identifies a variable, Type, Union, Enum, Function, Sub, or Property, within its scope or Namespace.

Identifiers may contain only uppercase and lowercase Latin characters a-z and A-Z), digits (0-9), and the underscore character (_). The first character of an identifier must be a letter or underscore, not a digit; if an identifier's length exceeds 128 characters, it will be truncated.

Identifiers are case-insensitive: FOO and foo (and all other permutations of uppercase and lowercase) refer to the same symbol.

In the -lang qb and -lang fblite dialects, identifiers may have a type suffix at the end indicating one of the standard data types:

• % for Integer
• & for Long
• ! for Single
• # for Double
• $ for String

The use of these suffixes is generally discouraged and is not allowed in the -lang fb dialect (the default).

The alternative is to be explicit - for example, Dim As Integer foo or Dim foo As Integer instead of Dim foo%.

In the -lang qb and -lang fblite dialects, identifiers may contain one or more periods (.).

Platform Differences

• Warning:

Dialect Differences

• Periods in symbol names are only supported in the -lang qb and -lang fblite dialects.

Differences from QB

• Support for the underscore character (_) in symbol names is new to FreeBASIC.

See also

• Variables
• Identifier Look-ups in namespaces and types

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