3.8 Identifiers

An identifier is an unlimited-length sequence of Java letters and Java digits, the first of which must be a Java letter. An identifier cannot have the same spelling (Unicode character sequence) as a keyword (§3.9), Boolean literal (§3.10.3), or the null literal (§3.10.7).

Identifier:

	IdentifierChars but not a Keyword or BooleanLiteral or NullLiteral

IdentifierChars:

	JavaLetter

	IdentifierChars JavaLetterOrDigit

JavaLetter:

	any Unicode character that is a Java letter (see below)

JavaLetterOrDigit:

	any Unicode character that is a Java letter-or-digit (see below)

Letters and digits may be drawn from the entire Unicode character set, which supports most writing scripts in use in the world today, including the large sets for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This allows Java programmers to use identifiers in their programs that are written in their native languages.

A Java letter is a character for which the method Character.isJavaLetter (§20.5.17) returns true. A Java letter-or-digit is a character for which the method Character.isJavaLetterOrDigit (§20.5.18) returns true.

The Java letters include uppercase and lowercase ASCII Latin letters A-Z (\u0041-\u005a), and a-z (\u0061-\u007a), and, for historical reasons, the ASCII underscore (_, or \u005f) and dollar sign ($, or \u0024). The $ character should be used only in mechanically generated Java code or, rarely, to access preexisting names on legacy systems.

The Java digits include the ASCII digits 0-9 (\u0030-\u0039).

Two identifiers are the same only if they are identical, that is, have the same Unicode character for each letter or digit.

Identifiers that have the same external appearance may yet be different. For example, the identifiers consisting of the single letters LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A (A, \u0041), LATIN SMALL LETTER A (a, \u0061), GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA (A, \u0391), and CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A (a, \u0430) are all different.

Unicode composite characters are different from the decomposed characters. For example, a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A ACUTE (Á, \u00c1) could be considered to be the same as a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A (A, \u0041) immediately followed by a NON-SPACING ACUTE (´, \u0301) when sorting, but these are different in Java identifiers. See The Unicode Standard, Volume 1, pages 412ff for details about decomposition, and see pages 626-627 of that work for details about sorting.

Examples of identifiers are:

	String			i3					MAX_VALUE				isLetterOrDigit