GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) Internals: Identifiers

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10.2.2 Identifiers

An IDENTIFIER_NODE represents a slightly more general concept than the standard C or C++ concept of identifier. In particular, an IDENTIFIER_NODE may contain a ‘$’, or other extraordinary characters.

There are never two distinct IDENTIFIER_NODEs representing the same identifier. Therefore, you may use pointer equality to compare IDENTIFIER_NODEs, rather than using a routine like strcmp. Use get_identifier to obtain the unique IDENTIFIER_NODE for a supplied string.

You can use the following macros to access identifiers:

IDENTIFIER_POINTER

The string represented by the identifier, represented as a char*. This string is always NUL-terminated, and contains no embedded NUL characters.

IDENTIFIER_LENGTH

The length of the string returned by IDENTIFIER_POINTER, not including the trailing NUL. This value of IDENTIFIER_LENGTH (x) is always the same as strlen (IDENTIFIER_POINTER (x)).

IDENTIFIER_OPNAME_P

This predicate holds if the identifier represents the name of an overloaded operator. In this case, you should not depend on the contents of either the IDENTIFIER_POINTER or the IDENTIFIER_LENGTH.

IDENTIFIER_TYPENAME_P

This predicate holds if the identifier represents the name of a user-defined conversion operator. In this case, the TREE_TYPE of the IDENTIFIER_NODE holds the type to which the conversion operator converts.