Sigil (computer programming)
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
In computer programming, a sigil is a symbol attached to a variable name, showing the variable's datatype. The term was first used by Philip Gwyn.
The use of sigils was popularized by the BASIC programming language. The best known example of a sigil in BASIC is the dollar sign ("$") appended to the names of all strings. Other sigils existed for integers and floating point numbers, and sometimes for other types as well.
Larry Wall adopted BASIC's concept of sigils for his popular scripting language Perl. However, as Perl is a dynamically typed language, the sigils specify not fine-grained data types like strings and integers, but general categories such as scalars, lists, and hashes.
In the PHP language, which was derived partly from Perl, a dollar sign ("$") precedes any variable name. Names not prepended by this are considered constants.
