3.2 Lexical Conventions

   This section1 presents the lexical conventions of OMG IDL. It defines tokens in an OMG IDL specification and describes comments, identifiers, keywords, and literals—integer, character, and floating point constants and string literals.

   An OMG IDL specification logically consists of one or more files. A file is conceptually translated in several phases.

   The first phase is preprocessing, which performs file inclusion and macro substitution. Preprocessing is controlled by directives introduced by lines having # as the first character other than white space. The result of preprocessing is a sequence of tokens. Such a sequence of tokens, that is, a file after preprocessing, is called a translation unit.

   OMG IDL uses the ASCII character set, except for string literals and character literals, which use the ISO Latin-1 (8859.1) character set. The ISO Latin-1 character set is divided into alphabetic characters (letters) digits, graphic characters, the space (blank) character, and formatting characters. Table 3-2 shows the ISO Latin-1 alphabetic characters; upper and lower case equivalences are paired. The ASCII alphabetic characters are shown in the left-hand column of Table 3-2.

   Table 3-2 The 114 Alphabetic Characters (Letters)

   1. This section is an adaptation of The Annotated C++ Reference Manual, Chapter 2; it differs in the list of legal keywords and punctuation.

   July 2002 CORBA, v3.0: Lexical Conventions

   Table 3-2 The 114 Alphabetic Characters (Letters) (Continued)

    Table 3-3 lists the decimal digit characters. Table 3-3 Decimal Digits

   0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

    Table 3-4 shows the graphic characters. Table 3-4 The 65 Graphic Characters

   Table 3-4 The 65 Graphic Characters (Continued)

    The formatting characters are shown in Table 3-5. Table 3-5 The Formatting Characters

   Table 3-5 The Formatting Characters