What are the rules for valid identifiers (e.g. functions, vars, etc) in Bash?

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From the manual:

   Shell Function Definitions
       ...
       name () compound-command [redirection]
       function name [()] compound-command [redirection]

name is defined elsewhere:

       name   A  word  consisting  only  of alphanumeric characters and under‐
              scores, and beginning with an alphabetic character or an  under‐
              score.  Also referred to as an identifier.

So hyphens are not valid. And yet, on my system, they do work…

$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.2.25(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)

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