A symbol is one or more characters chosen from the set of all
letters (both upper and lower case), digits and the three characters
‘_.$’.
On most machines, you can also use $
in symbol names; exceptions
are noted in Machine Dependent Features.
No symbol may begin with a digit. Case is significant.
There is no length limit; all characters are significant. Multibyte characters
are supported, but note that the setting of the
--multibyte-handling option might prevent their use. Symbols
are delimited by characters not in that set, or by the beginning of a file
(since the source program must end with a newline, the end of a file is not a
possible symbol delimiter). See Symbols.
Symbol names may also be enclosed in double quote "
characters. In such
cases any characters are allowed, except for the NUL character. If a double
quote character is to be included in the symbol name it must be preceded by a
backslash \
character.