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Asked: 2026-06-03T21:30:42+00:00

The most beautiful about standards is that there are so many. When reading the

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The most beautiful about standards is that there are so many. When reading the C++11 standard compared to the CLI-Standard (5th edition), I’m getting a little bit confused about the identifier naming.

Where C++ allows according [ISO/IEC 14882:2011 page 23] ASCI: _a-zA-Z0-9 (regardless the order) and according [page 1249] A lot of unicode characters .. there is no definition for $ (0x24). On the other hand [ECMA335 partition II page 13] allows a-zA-Z0-9_``@$ as identifier-characters.

In other words C++ shouldn’t support $ (0x24) inside identifier names, but the CLR should. When testing this i’ve noticed exactly the opposite:

So what is the truth? Am I missing something when reading the standards? Or is everybody doing what he wants to do?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A complication is that section 2.2 says:

    Physical source file characters are mapped, in an implementation-defined manner, to the basic source character set (introducing new-line characters for end-of-line indicators) if necessary. The set of physical source file characters accepted is implementation-defined.

    So we formally don’t know that the $ in the source file corresponds to a dollar sign in the identifier. It just might be mapped to something else.

    The requirements in the language standard is also a minimum what an implementation must provide. All compilers provide extensions to the standard language. Allowing extra characters in identifier names might be such an extension, possibly to support old pre-standard code or some OS specific features.

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