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6.2 Variables

A variable by itself is a well-formed expression of the same type as the variable. Variables in Stan consist of ASCII strings containing only the basic lower-case and upper-case Roman letters, digits, and the underscore (_) character. Variables must start with a letter (a--z and A--Z) and may not end with two underscores (__).

Examples of legal variable identifiers are as follows.

a, a3, a_3, Sigma, my_cpp_style_variable, myCamelCaseVariable

Unlike in R and BUGS, variable identifiers in Stan may not contain a period character.

Reserved names

Stan reserves many strings for internal use and these may not be used as the name of a variable. An attempt to name a variable after an internal string results in the stanc translator halting with an error message indicating which reserved name was used and its location in the model code.

Model name

The name of the model cannot be used as a variable within the model. This is usually not a problem because the default in bin/stanc is to append _model to the name of the file containing the model specification. For example, if the model is in file foo.stan, it would not be legal to have a variable named foo_model when using the default model name through bin/stanc. With user-specified model names, variables cannot match the model.

Reserved words from Stan language

The following list contains reserved words for Stan’s programming language. Not all of these features are implemented in Stan yet, but the tokens are reserved for future use.

for, in, while, repeat, until, if, then, else,
true, false, target, struct, typedef, export,
auto, extern, var, static

Variables should not be named after types, either, and thus may not be any of the following.

int, real, complex, vector, simplex, unit_vector,
ordered, positive_ordered, row_vector, matrix,
cholesky_factor_corr, cholesky_factor_cov,
corr_matrix, cov_matrix

The following built in functions are also reserved and cannot be used as variable names:

print, reject, profile, get_lp, increment_log_prob,
target

The following block identifiers are reserved and cannot be used as variable names:

functions, model, data, parameters, quantities,
transformed, generated

Reserved distribution names

Variable names will also conflict with the names of distributions suffixed with _lpdf, _lpmf, _lcdf, and _lccdf, _cdf, and _ccdf, such as normal_lcdf_log; this also holds for the deprecated forms _log, _cdf_log, and _ccdf_log. No user-defined variable can take a name ending in _lupdf or _lupmf even if a corresponding _lpdf or _lpmf is not defined.

Using any of these variable names causes the stanc translator to halt and report the name and location of the variable causing the conflict.

Reserved names backend languages

Stan primarily generates code in C++, which features its own reserved words. It is legal to name a variable any of the following names, however doing so will lead to it being renamed _stan_NAME (e.g. _stan_public) behind the scenes (in the generated C++ code).

alignas, alignof, and, and_eq, asm, bitand, bitor, bool,
case, catch, char, char16_t, char32_t, class, compl, const,
constexpr, const_cast, decltype, default, delete, do,
double, dynamic_cast, enum, explicit, float, friend, goto,
inline, long, mutable, namespace, new, noexcept, not, not_eq,
nullptr, operator, or, or_eq, private, protected, public,
register, reinterpret_cast, short, signed, sizeof,
static_assert, static_cast, switch, template, this, thread_local,
throw, try, typeid, typename, union, unsigned, using, virtual,
volatile, wchar_t, xor, xor_eq, fvar, STAN_MAJOR, STAN_MINOR,
STAN_PATCH, STAN_MATH_MAJOR, STAN_MATH_MINOR, STAN_MATH_PATCH