Identifiers are used to give names to several classes of language objects and refer to these objects by name later:
value-name: lowercase-ident |(
operator-name)
operator-name: prefix-symbol | infix-symbol |*
|=
|or
|&
|:=
cconstr-name: capitalized-ident |false
|true
|[
]
|(
)
ncconstr-name: capitalized-ident |::
typeconstr-name: lowercase-ident label-name: lowercase-ident module-name: capitalized-ident modtype-name: ident class-name: lowercase-ident inst-var-name: lowercase-ident method-name: lowercase-ident
As shown above, prefix and infix symbols as well as some keywords can be used as value names, provided they are written between parentheses. Keywords such as '::' and 'false' are also constructor names. The capitalization rules are summarized in the table below.
Name space | Case of first letter |
---|---|
Values | lowercase |
Constructors | uppercase |
Type constructors | lowercase |
Record labels | lowercase |
Classes | lowercase |
Methods | lowercase |
Modules | uppercase |
Module types | any |
value-path: value-name | module-path.
lowercase-ident cconstr: cconstr-name | module-path.
capitalized-ident ncconstr: ncconstr-name | module-path.
capitalized-ident typeconstr: typeconstr-name | extended-module-path.
lowercase-ident label: label-name | module-path.
lowercase-ident module-path: module-name | module-path.
capitalized-ident extended-module-path: module-name | extended-module-path.
capitalized-ident | extended-module-path(
extended-module-path)
modtype-path: modtype-name | extended-module-path.
ident class-path: class-name | module-path.
lowercase-ident
A named object can be referred to either by its name (following the
usual static scoping rules for names) or by an access path prefix .
name,
where prefix designates a module and name is the name of an object
defined in that module. The first component of the path, prefix, is
either a simple module name or an access path name1 .
name2...,
in case the defining module is itself nested inside other modules.
For referring to type constructors or module types, the prefix can
also contain simple functor applications (as in the syntactic class
extended-module-path above), in case the defining module is the
result of a functor application.
Instance variable names and method names need not be qualified: the former are local to a class while the latter are global labels.