Oracle PL/SQL Language Pocket Reference, 4th Edition

PL/SQL Language Fundamentals

This section summarizes the fundamental components of the PL/SQL language: characters, identifiers, literals, delimiters, use of comments and pragmas, and construction of statements and blocks.

PL/SQL Character Set

The PL/SQL language is constructed from letters, digits, symbols, and whitespace, as defined in the following table:

Type	Characters
Letters	A—Z, a—z
Digits	0—9
Symbols	˜!@#$%^&*( )_−+=|[ ]{ }:;"'< >,.?/ ^
Whitespace	space, tab, newline, carriage return

Characters are grouped together into four lexical units: identifiers, literals, delimiters, and comments.

Identifiers

Identifiers are names for PL/SQL objects such as constants, variables, exceptions, procedures, cursors, and reserved words. Identifiers have the following characteristics:

• Can be up to 30 characters in length

• Cannot include whitespace (space, tab, carriage return)

• Must start with a letter

• Can include a dollar sign ($), an underscore (_ ), and a pound sign (#)

• Are not case-sensitive

Using PL/SQL’s reserved words as identifiers in your programs is not a good idea and can result in compilation or runtime errors that are difficult to troubleshoot.

Tip

Earlier editions of this book included a list of reserved words. However, Oracle Database 11g Release 1 has more than 1600 reserved words as listed in the V$RESERVED_WORDS data dictionary view. In our testing we determined that more than 650 of these could not be used as procedure names or variable names. Consult V$RESERVED_WORDS for the full list of unsupported ...