Question

I realize that it is a valid part of a variable name, but I’ve never seen variable names actually use the symbol $ before.

The Java tutorial says this:

Additionally, the dollar sign character, by convention, is never used at all. You may find some situations where auto-generated names will contain the dollar sign, but your variable names should always avoid using it.

However, since this is geared toward Java beginners, I’m wondering if in the distributed world, the $ lives on with a special meaning.

Answer 1

The only time I’ve ever seen this is

• in generated proxy classes, which frequently use $ in their method, variable and class names
• inner->outer class synthetic accessor methods, which I think also use a $ in the method name
• inner class names (as seen by the JVM)

I’ve never seen it used in source code, though, and I can’t think of any reason for doing so. The $ is almost a definitive indicator of generated code.