A dot preceding a name is either an assembler directive or a local label.
An assembler directive tells as
to do something special, for example .text
tells it to generate data in the text section of the object file (for things like code and literals that cannot be changed). There's also directives like .space
which tell it to allocate empty space in the object file, this is often used to allocate space in the bss section.
On the other hand, we have local labels like .L1
that are used in the code but aren't meant to be exported in the object file and should be hidden from the symbol table.