4.6 Identifiers

Assembly identifiers are user-defined symbols representing memory locations or numbers. A symbol can contain any number of characters drawn from alphabetics, numerics, as well as special characters: dollar, $; question mark, ?; and underscore, _.

The first character of an identifier cannot be numeric nor the $ character. The case of alphabetics is significant, e.g., Fred is not the same symbol as fred. Some examples of identifiers are shown here:

An_identifier
an_identifier
an_identifier1
?$_12345

An identifier cannot have the same symbol (any case) as any of the assembly code mnemonics (e.g. movlw or return) assembler directives (e.g. SET or LIST), directive argument tokens (e.g. hex or push), or operators (e.g. mod or nul).