The following rules apply to ABL data field naming conventions:
Names can be up to 32 characters long and can consist of alphabetic characters (A-Z or a-z) and/or digits (0-9).
They can be written in any combination of uppercase or lowercase letters and digits (0-9).
They must begin with an uppercase letter or lowercase letter.
They can contain the pound sign (#), dollar sign ($), percent sign (%), ampersand (&), hyphen (-), and underscore (_).
They are not case sensitive.
They cannot use ABL keywords.
Note: Although the ABL itself has many hyphenated keywords, Progress Software Corporation recommends that you do not use hyphens in database table and field names, because the SQL standard does not allow hyphens in table and column names. Hyphenated identifiers can be used if delimited in SQL.
Names can be up to 32 characters long and can consist of alphabetic characters (A-Z or a-z) and/or digits (0-9).