Naming

Naming Rules

There are a couple of naming rules we need to consider: 1) module names, 2) method names, 3) variable names, and 4) type names.

1. Module Names

A module name consists of a standard name: starting with a letter; following with letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores; ending with a letter or a number. In EBNF, it can be described as follows.

name   ::= letter { {hyphen} alpha }
alpha  ::= letter | digit
hyphen ::= "-" | "_"

The default name of a module is default.

module default{
    ...
}

Note: any method declared without a module around it, is considered as a member of the default module.

2. Method Names

A method name is the same as the module name in the method definition. However, when it is invoked from a method outside the current module, a compound name is used. Since different modules may have the same method names, using a compound name can resolve such problem by giving both module and method names.

A compound name consists of two names concatenated by a dot (".").

compound_name ::= name "." name

3. Variable Names

A variable name should follow the same definition of a module name. In fact, it usually comes with an associated type in a variable assignment.

statement ::= name type assign expression

4. Type Names

There are kinds of types as follows

• a wildcard
• a fixed-size type
• a dynamic-size type

4.1 Wildcard

A wildcard (?) is defined as an unkown type statically, but a specific type is assigned dynamically. It could be any type so that it represents any possible type case.

4.2 Fixed-size Type

A fixed-size type comes with a number which indicates how many bits should be allocated.

i8   //small
i16  //short
i32  //int
i64  //long
f32  //float
f64  //double

Also, a fixed-size type can be a meaningful name.

bool         //boolean
complex      //complex number
sym          //symbol
m/d/z/u/v/t  //date time

4.3 Dynamic-size Type

A dynamic-size type is a mixed type with compound types, including wildcards.

type_list    ::= "list" "<" type ">"
type_dict    ::= "dict" "<" type, type ">"
type_enum    ::= "enum" "<" type ">"
type_table   ::= "table"
type_ktable  ::= "ktable"