name - Maple Help

Names

Description

 • A name in its simplest form is a letter followed by zero or more letters, digits, underscore characters (_) and question marks (?), with lowercase and uppercase letters distinct.  The maximum length of a name is system dependent. On 32-bit platforms, it is 268,435,439 characters; on 64-bit platforms, it is 34,359,738,335 characters.
 • There are two types of names: indexed names and symbols (non-indexed names).
 • Any expression can be assigned to a name. If no value has been assigned to the name, then it stands for itself.
 • Names can be formed with the concatenation operator || or with the function cat. For more information, see the help page for cat.
 • A variable name beginning with _Env is considered an environment variable.
 • Names that start with an underscore (with the exception of _Env) are used as global variable names by Maple and are effectively reserved for use by library code. Do not use a symbol beginning with an underscore. In addition, the empty name  has various special uses in Maple and should not be assigned a value. Failure to follow these rules can lead to unexpected results.
 • Names containing a slash (/) are generally reserved for use by library code and should not be assigned a value unless explicitly recommended on a help page.
 • Names that end with a tilde (~) are used by Maple to denote variables with assumptions on them and therefore should also be avoided by users.
 • Names that start with a tilde are used by the Maple spreadsheet component.  The tilde can be followed by a sequence of alphanumeric, underscore, or dollar sign characters.
 • A name can also be formed by enclosing any sequence of characters in a pair of left single quotes ( ). For example: This is a name! := 1.
 • Any valid Maple name formed without using left single quotes is precisely the same as the name formed by surrounding the name with left single quotes.  Therefore, x and x both refer to the same name x. However, a keyword cannot be used as a name unless it is enclosed in left single quotes.
 • In some previous releases of Maple, names formed by using left single quotes were used as character strings instead of names. A common example was the string used as an error message, for example,  ERROR(the argument must be an integer). This use of names has been made obsolete by the addition of the string type in Maple.
 • A backslash (\) within a name is considered an escape character to introduce control characters.  For more information, see backslash.  To display a name that includes the \ character, you must use two consecutive backslash characters: \\.
 • Two successive left single quotes that appear after the opening of a name are parsed as a single left single quote.  Thus,  abcde yields abcde. Alternatively, a left single quote can be written within a name by preceding it with a backslash (\ ), for example, abc\de.
 • The type function understands the type names symbol and indexed, and the type name is defined to be either of symbol or indexed.
 • A symbol can be converted into a string by using convert(aSymbol, string). Likewise, a string can be converted into a symbol by using convert(aString, symbol). Alternatively, one can use convert(aString, name).