What about the character #?

Hi,

I wonder if anyone have an idea about the character #. It appears to have no use in matlab and it can neither be used in variable names,

#a = 0; %ERROR!
b.#c = 0; %ERROR!

So, does it have some use that I have still to identify, is it excluded for a reason, ... I am simply curious, what is the thing with the hash?

Answer 1

[Thorsten]

There is no special thing with the hash. In some script languages it is used as the comment character, and I've seen things like

%# my comment here

You have to use alphanumeric characters for variables, functions etc, and they must not start with a number. Like #, you cannot use $, !, § etc.

So in principle Mathworks could have decided to allow #, but probably because it is not allowed in variable or function names in all programming languages that I know, they decided the same for Matlab.

[Patrik Ek]

Ok, I suspected something like that. The main reason that I started to think about it was that I got a crash in some legacy code since the files it parsed suddenly started to get properties like #Things instead of NumThings. Though it may not have been the choice of mine I guess I have little choice in this. A `strrep` solved the issue anyway. Thanks for the explanation.