gdb: print doesn't recognize variables with non-standard names or characters?

I'm writing a little BASIC compiler using LLVM, everything works fine. I'm trying to get debugging to work, and it's going fine, but I have a weird issue with variable names and GDB's print statement.

A little background on BASIC for those not familiar:

In BASIC, variable names use a symbol on the end to determine their type. So a variable x% would be integer, and variable x$ would be a string, and both can co-exist.

The statement DEFINT A-Z means that any variable starting with any letter from A to Z will be type INT, even without the trailing %. But, internally, my compiler will store the name mangled with the trailing % to avoid overlap with another variable with a trailing $.

Here is my little test program:

defint a-z

x = 5
y = 100
z = x + y
if x = 5 then
  print "z=";z
else
  print "z!=";z
end if

So 'x' is actually stored internally and put into the symbol table as x%.

OK, so I load my compiled EXE into GDB...

D:\dev\BasicParser>gdb t.exe
GNU gdb (GDB) 7.4
Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i686-pc-mingw32".
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>...
Reading symbols from D:\dev\BasicParser\t.exe...done.
(gdb) b _jbc_main
Breakpoint 1 at 0x401000: file t.bas, line 1.
(gdb) r
Starting program: D:\dev\BasicParser\t.exe
[New Thread 1532.0x25b8]

Breakpoint 1, _jbc_main () at t.bas:1
1       defint a-z
(gdb) n
4       x = 5
(gdb) info address x%
Symbol "x%" is static storage at address 0x4263c4.

At this point, you can see that GDB recognizes the symbol x% because it recognizes and display it's address. But the following "print" fails:

(gdb) print x%
No symbol "x" in current context.

Hmmm... that's interesting ... it dropped the % symbol.

But I can look at the memory location where x% is stored and this looks correct:

(gdb) x 0x4263c4
0x4263c4 <x%>:  0x00000000

If I show all symbols I get this as expected:

(gdb) info variables
All defined variables:

File t.bas:
static i32 x%;
static i32 y%;
static i32 z%;

Continuing on, to show that x% does get modified by the code:

(gdb) n
5       y = 100
(gdb) print x%
No symbol "x" in current context.
(gdb) x 0x4263c4
0x4263c4 <x%>:  0x00000005
(gdb)

And as you can see, the memory that GDB thinks x% is at is definitely updated.

For some reason, the "print" command doesn't like the % symbol.

Here is the "info source" results on this module, you can see I didn't specify C as the language:

(gdb) info source
Current source file is t.bas
Compilation directory is D:\dev\BasicParser
Located in D:\dev\BasicParser\t.bas
Contains 18 lines.
Source language is minimal.
Compiled with DWARF 2 debugging format.
Does not include preprocessor macro info.

Any ideas for workarounds? I've been searching and searching and can't find a solution.

Thanks!