Discriminator

In computing, a discriminator is a field of characters designed to separate a certain element from others of the same identifier. As an example, suppose that a program must save two unique objects to memory, both of whose identifiers happen to be . To ensure the two objects are not conflated, the program may assign ''discriminators'' to the objects in the form of numbers; thus, and distinguish both objects named .

This has been adopted by programming languages as well as digital platforms for instant messaging and massively multiplayer online games. Provided by Wikipedia