What Is A Reserved Word?

The programming languages use commands to perform any task. These commands are written in a specific syntax. The complier (or interpreter) recognizes these commands. These commands have special meaning for the compilers. These commands can be functions, methods or data manipulations commands. All these commands are the reserve words. Theses commands have predefined meaning for the compilers.

The variables are the used to store the data during the program execution. These variables can have any name other than the reserve words. The user defined functions or classes also follow this rule of naming. If we name variables same like the reserve words than the complier may show an error message. For example, IF is a reserve word, which is used almost in all type of languages. We cannot use this reserve word as a variable name. The programmers normally use different techniques to avoid conflict between the variable name and the reserve words. One technique is to use hyphen in the variable name.

The reserve word problem is also faced when we name a file. Some names are reserved for specific hardware. We cannot files for these reserved hardware names. The examples of these names are CON, PRN, COM and etc.