Sigil

Sigil may refer to:

A symbol or emblem

Media

Computing

Sigil (Dungeons & Dragons)

Sigil /ˈsɪɡᵻl/ is a fictional city and the center of the Planescape campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game.

Development

Sigil was originally created for Planescape as the setting's "home base." According to Steve Winter in 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons, "A movable base, like a vessel of some sort (or an artifact, which was the original idea for the means of traversing the planes) wouldn't do it. It had to be a place that characters could come home to when they needed to, and it had to be central to the nature of the setting." Sigil's fifteen factions were created because, "Vampire: The Masquerade was a particularly hot game at [the] time and one of the ideas in it that we really liked was the clans. Jim Ward wanted to be sure that players had something to identify with and to give them a sense of belonging in this alien venue [Sigil]."

Scott Haring, in his review of the Planescape Campaign Setting for Pyramid, described Sigil as "a strange city with doors to every plane and every reality, and inhabitants from all those planes and realities living together in (more or less) harmony." Trenton Webb of British RPG magazine Arcane calls the city "splendidly bizarre" and declares that "Sigil, The Lady of Pain's citadel, is an elegant gaming construct, yet it can often feel a little hollow", feeling that life in Sigil should be "a swirl of plots, factions and sedition that leaves players' heads spinning, wounds bleeding and experience points tally in overdrive".Trenton Webb reviewed Uncaged: Faces of Sigil for Arcane magazine, rating it a 9 out of 10 overall.

Sigil (computer programming)

In computer programming, a sigil (/ˈsɪdʒəl/) is a symbol attached to a variable name, showing the variable's datatype or scope, usually a prefix, as in $foo, where $ is the sigil.

Sigil, from the Latin sigillum, meaning a "little sign", means a sign or image supposedly having magical power. In 1999 Philip Gwyn adopted the term "to mean the funny character at the front of a Perl variable".

Historical context

The use of sigils was popularized by the BASIC programming language. The best known example of a sigil in BASIC is the dollar sign ("$") appended to the names of all strings. Many BASIC dialects use other sigils (like "%") to denote integers and floating point numbers and their precision, and sometimes other types as well.

Larry Wall adopted shell scripting's use of sigils for his Perl programming language. However, as Perl is a dynamically typed language, the sigils specify not fine-grained data-types like strings and integers, but the more general categories of scalars (using a prefixed "$"), arrays (using "@"), hashes (using "%"), and subroutines (using "&"). Perl 6 introduces secondary sigils, or twigils, to indicate the scope of variables. Prominent examples of twigils in Perl 6 include "^", used with self-declared formal parameters ("placeholder variables"), and ".", used with object attribute accessors (i.e., instance variables).