Variable Names

[CharlieJV]

Is there a reason why a variable name can not begin with a numerical value? ie a1 = 100 is ok but 1a = 100 or 1a$ = "100" is not ok.

Not that I know a heck of a whole lot about interpreters/compilers parsing and tokenising (?) a program, but I imagine there's value in the process knowing immediately that:

• it is dealing with a literal number (because of a digit)
  
• versus it is dealing with a literal string (because of a double-quote)
  
• versus it is dealing with an identifier (variable, constant, function ... because of an alphabetic character)
  

I think.